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STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


THE OLD TESTAMENT. 


BY 


THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D. 


few Work 
E. B. TREAT & COMPANY 
Office of THe TREASURY MaGazine 
a4z-243 West 23d Street 


1903 








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CONTENTS. 


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ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD......ceccccccccccccsccccccces 
ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT, ..cccccccccccccccscccscccccs 
y JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN... .cccccccccccccccescccceccses 


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STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


—eo{oe——— 


Shrahum the Friend of Gov. 


A VISIT to Italy is the aim of every artist. 
Ordinary travellers crowd its palaces, churches, 
and galleries, to gratify a common curiosity, 
or enjoy the pleasures their treasures yield to 
every cultivated mind. Artists seek that beautiful 
land for a higher purpose. To them it is what our 
schools and universities are to the student of 
languages or of science ; and they regard a visit to 
Italy as such an important, if not essential, part 
of their education, that I have known a sculptor, 
on emerging from the straitened circumstances 
through which he had risen to fame, leave home, 
wife, and children to go there, and enjoy in 
mature years the benefits which the poverty of his 
youth denied him. By a long, careful, and ardent 
study of their works, the artist hopes, and not 
without good reason, to catch the spirit of the 
great masters. Thus he seeks to refine his taste; . 
to form a high standard of excellence; and to 
acquire an eye and hand whereby to approach !f 
not equal, to equal if not surpass, the triumphs of 
ancient art. The children of this world, as our 
Lord says, are wise in their generation. With 


314294 


8 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


a care to excel, which, in obeying the apostolic 
injunction, “covet the best gifts,” the children 
of light would do well to imitate, see how the 
sculptor surrounds himself, even in his studio, with 
copies of the most famous statues! He fills 
his mind with images of the sublime and beautiful ; 
and provides objects for his eye, wheresoever 
it turns, adapted to kindle his ambition and 
improve his taste. 

Man is so constituted that, even unconsciously, 
without either intending or attempting it, he 
imitates what he is familiar with. We speak, for 
instance, with the peculiar accent of our native 
district, and—a matter of much more consequence— 
learn almost certainly to copy in our lives the 
manners and morals of our ordinary associates. 
According to vulgar belief, the chameleon becomes 
red, blue, or green, with the ground it lies on ; and, 
probably with the view of protecting them from 
their enemies, fishes certainly do take the color 
of the water they live in, whether it be clear or 
muddy. Man is endowed with a property akin to 
this To that, so pregnant with good or evil, as 
much as to the pleasure people feel in associating 
with those of tastes similar to their own, we owe the 
well-known saying, ‘“‘ Tell me your company, and I 
will tell you your character.” Hence the wisdom 
of David's practice, ‘‘I am the companion of all 
them that fear thee.” Hence also, on the other 
hand, it happens, to quote a scripture adage, that 
“ Evil communications corrupt good manners.” 

This property, though many, especially of the 
young, owe their ruin to it, is not, necessarily, like 
“he poisoned garment bestowed on Hercules, a 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 9 


fatal gift. It was given by our Maker for good 
purposes. It may be turned, though nothing can 
supply the place of Divine grace and a change of 
heart, to the holiest ends. For as the artist who 
repairs to Rome, or Florence, to fill his eye with 
the works of the great masters, imbibes somewhat 
of their genius, and learns thereby to excel in 
sculpture, architecture, or painting, the Christian 
will derive a similar advantage from studying those 
excellent models of piety and virtue which are 
found in the biographies of the Bible. Here is 
a gallery of admirable paintings. Here the student 
of holy and heavenly arts finds it as profitable 
as pleasant to pass hours of devout meditation. 
“ All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and 
is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction in righteousness.” But no part of it 
more so than the lives of the grand saints of old. 
While I was musing, says one of them, the fire 
burned ; and it is not in the nature of things for a 
Christian man to sit down to his Bible, and turn 
to the history of its saints, and hold communion 
with them, without imbibing somewhat of their 
spirit. As he muses on their virtues and piety, 
he will feel in holy desires the fires that glowed in 
their bosoms kindling and burning in his own. 

No doubt God’s people possess a perfect model 
in Jesus Christ. He is at once a Propitiation for 
our sins, and a Pattern for our lives. His is indeed 
the only life that presents such a faultless model— 
a complete illustration of the principles on which 
our lives should be framed. He was what no 
other man ever was—holy, harmless, and undefiled ; 
separate from sinners; a lamb without spot or 


10 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


blemish; perfectly fulfilling all the duties man 
owes to God, and also to his neighbor. 

For example, He made it his meat and drink 
to do his Father’s will; and also to bear it—the 
mighty load which by its immeasurable and un- 
imaginable pressure forced the blood from his 
pores, till, crimsoning the flowers, it fell in great 
drops to the ground, forcing from his lips no com- 
plaint nor expression of impatience: groans, in- 
deed, but with the groans that rent his bosom and 
astonished the dull ear of night, no other cry 
than this: ‘Father, if it be thy will, let this cup 
pass from me: nevertheless not my will but thine 
be done, O Father!” His perfect obedience sprang 
from perfect love. He loved the Lord his God 
with all his heart, and all his mind, and all his 
strength, and all his spirit—doing what we shall 
never do till, seeing Him, we become like Him 
as He is. Again, He offered an equally perfect 
illustration of the second table of the law—of the 
love we owe to man, as of that man owes to God. 
In regard to this, the purest, kindest, tenderest, 
holiest, most generous of men, have never equailed 
nor approached Him. The pity which moved 
Abraham to plead with such bold urgency for 
guilty Sodom ; the affection of Ruth when, throw- 
ing her arms around Naomi’s neck, she clung to 
her like a beautiful tendril around a hoar and aged 
tree, with tears, and kisses, and embraces, saying : 
““Entreat me not to leave thee . . . for whither 
thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I 
will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy 
God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and 
there will I be buried ;” the matchless friendship by 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. tf 


whose grave David stood with streaming eyes, 
moving the roughest of his soldiers with this 
plaintive cry, ‘‘I am distressed for thee, my brother 
Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me; 
thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of 
women ;” the heart which broke at the fall of 
Absalom, and as if that bad man had been the 
kindest, truest, most dutiful of sons, broke out into 
this terrible and touching cry : “‘O my son Absalom, 
my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died 
for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” are grand 
and touching. Yet to the compassion that wept 
over the guilty city, saying : ‘‘O Jerusalem, Jerusa- 
lem, how would I have gathered thy children as a 
hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but 
thou wouldest not—now is thy house left unto thee 
desolate ;” to the friendship which groaned at the 
grave of Lazarus ; to the kindness which restored 
her only son to a widowed mother at the gate of 
Nain ; to the mercy that shielded a poor trembling 
outcast, prostrate and penitent, in Simon’s house ; 
above all, to the forgiveness that prayed for 
murderers, and the love that bled on Calvary,— 
these are as the shallow waters of a rocky pool to 
the great ocean which has filled it with the spray 
of one of its breaking waves. 

Who among the sons of the mighty can be 
likened unto the Lord? The perfect model of 
love to God, He also is the perfect model of love 
to man, who, rising above the old terms of the law, 
taking a higher flight, says, not ‘“‘ Love your neigh- 
bor as yourselves,” but ‘‘ Love one another even as 
I have loved you !” 

It is true that with the sun shining we feel no 


12 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


need for those lesser orbs that lose their lustre in 
his overwhelming brightness. But it is not true 
that with a perfect model of every virtue and grace 
in Jesus Christ we have no need of any other. 
Children must creep before they walk: and on 
such as are only yet able to make feeble efforts in 
the direction of what is good, the very fact that 
Christ presents not merely a high, but a perfect 
model, may have somewhat of a depressing and 
deterring influence. To live like Him seems a 
hopeless task. What David said of knowledge, we 
are ready to say of such an attainment, It is too 
high for me—I need not attempt it. Who shall 
imitate the inimitable—the God-man who walked 
aloft and alone, leaving all who have attempted to 
follow Him, the greatest saints, far below, lagging 
far behind? Greatly superior to us as Abraham, 
and Moses, and David, and Paul appear, they 
resemble those lofty mountains to whose tops, 
though raised high above the level plain and 
piercing the clouds with their glistening snows, a 
brave cragsman may climb ; but Jesus, occupying 
a higher region, seems like the star that shines 
above them—which, though we should mount up 
on eagle’s wings, it would be impossible to reach. 
It is not impossible. We are assured that when 
we shall see Him, we shall be like Him as He is. 
Yet there are times of defeat, there are periods of 
spiritual depression, there are moods such as Peter’s 
when he cried: ‘“ Depart from me, O Lord, for 
thou art a righteous man ;” when one, who might 
otherwise give up in despair, will attempt the 
imitation of an imperfect model, and find in its 
very imperfections encouragement to persevere, 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 13 


Besides, while Jesus was, in a sense, tempted in 
all points like as we are, yet without sin, and while 
his life does certainly illustrate the grand principles 
of our duty both toward God and man, the saints 
are vety valuable as models, since they teach us 
how to act in circumstances in which our Lord was 
never placed, but we often are. Though bone of 
our bone and flesh of our flesh, and as such having 
a fellow-feeling with all our infirmities, He was not 
a fallen man as we are, and the saints were. Ani- 
mated by the same passions, placed in the same 
relationships, and called to endure the same trials 
as ourselves, their footprints teach us where to 
walk, and their triumphs how to conquer; their 
failings, into what sins we may fall ; and their graces, 
to what attainments we should aspire. We look 
on Jesus, nor can hope to be altogether such as He 
was, till death’s strong hand break the mould of 
clay, and we are brought forth, to the admiration 
and joy of angels, a perfect image of our Lord and 
Master. But in the faith of Abraham and the 
chastity of Joseph, the meekness of Moses and 
the patience of Job, the piety of David and the 
fidelity of Daniel, the zeal of Paul and the love 
of John, we see what attainments others have 
reached, to what heights of grace we ourselves 
may aspire. 

God’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save, 
neither is his ear heavy that it cannot hear; and 
there is no reason in the world, therefore, why, in 
any one heavenly grace we should stand second to 
these saints; why we should not be as good as 
they were. Indeed, since we live in happier cir 
cumstances than many of them did, walk 


14 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


brighter light, and enjoy a fuller revelation of the 
love of God in Jesus Christ, and a fuller dispensa- 
tion of the Holy Spirit, I know of no reason why 
men of this age should not be better than they 
were, and climb to heights of grace the patriarchs 
never trod. There is a story told of a king of 
Israel who stood by Elisha’s death-bed, weeping 
and crying: ‘‘O, my father, my father, the chariot 
of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!” The dying 
prophet made him take arrows, and smite on the 
ground. He smote but thrice, and stayed; and 
the man of God was wroth with him, and said: 
“Thou shouldst have smitten five or six times; 
then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst con- 
sumed it.” Like him, we lose much by not hoping 
for more, praying for more, and attempting more. 
What we at any rate may, and should therefore 
strive to attain, we read in the lives of these grand 
Scripture characters. Nor is it in the nature of 
things for a renewed man to contemplate without 
admiring, or to admire without desiring to resemble 
them. Such desires give birth to efforts, and every 
such effort in this holy as in other arts, is a step 
to success. It is here, as in the acquisition of a 
language or of a science, of a trade or of a pro- 
fession—present failures lay the foundation of 
future triumphs. Certainly there is nothing either 
in our failures, or in the loftiest attainments of such 
men as Abraham, Moses, or David, to discourage 
us. The course to which God calls the humblest 
Christian is one grander than they attained—a 
career the grandest imagination can fancy. Should 
we reach their height, far above us as now they 
seem, we are to be thankful, but not to rest. We 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 15 


have not yet attained, nor are already perfect. 
There are heights beyond, above—that, where 
Jesus stands kindly watching our progress and 
calling down to us, as, often on our knees, we climb 
the steep ascent, ‘‘Come ye up hither.” So leav- 
ing Abraham binding his son on the altar; Job, 
as, sitting amid the ruins of all his fortune and 
the graves of all his children, he says: ‘‘ The Lord 
gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed 
be the name of the Lord;” David, descending 
from a throne to tune his harp and fill a royal 
palace with sacred melodies ; Daniel on his knees 
with a window thrown open to Jerusalem, within 
eyesight of malignant spies and earshot of the lions 
that roar ravening for their prey ; Elijah on Mount 
Carmel, with his back to the altar of God and 
his face to a hostile world,—among the faithless, 
faithful only he ;—leaving these grand spectacles 
below, we are to toil upwards to Jesus. Forgetting 
the things which are behind, let us press forward 
to the mark of the prize of our high calling in 
Jesus Christ. The goal is this: ‘Be ye perfect, as 
your Father in heaven is perfect.” 


To address myself now to the direct purpose of 
this book. In Abraham I begin my sketches with 
one who, save our first father Adam, is in some 
respects the most remarkable man, the greatest 
character, in history. Not the mighty Nimrods, 
nor Pharaohs, nor Alexanders, nor Cesars, nor 
any other man, has left such a broad mark on the 
world—though he had no home on its surface but 
a tent, nor property in its soil but a tomb. His 
name is known where the greatest emperors and 


16 STUDIEL OF CHARACTER. 


conquerors were never so muchas heard of. There 
is no quarter of the globe to which it has not been 
carried ; and it is the only one which is venerated 
alike by Jews, and Christians, and Mahometans. 
For, whatever be their differences and jealousies, 
all of them, in one sense or another, claim an equal 
relationship with this distinguished patriarch, say- 
ing: ‘‘We have Abraham for our father!” Other 
men, of great statesmanship, or military powers, 
have founded nations ; but since the days of Crea- 
tion, or of the Deluge, he is the only man who was 
the father of a nation, the fountain from which a 
whole people sprang! The oldest of our families 
are but of yesterday compared with his. And as 
no house in the world is so ancient, to none has 
the world owed so much as to his. Through him 
the Saviour came. To his descendants God com- 
mitted those great truths which have overthrown 
the most ancient idolatries, have tamed the wildest 
savage, have emancipated the slave, have raised 
prostrate humanity, have dried up its bitterest 
tears and redressed its greatest wrongs, and are 
destined to overturn Satan’s empire throughout the 
whole bounds of earth, and establish on its ruins 
the reign of a holy and universal peace—restoring 
Eden to a defiled and distracted world, and, as in 
the days of primeval innocence, to humanity the 
image of its God. 

The biographer of any distinguished man consi- 
ders himself fortunate if he can present his readers 
in the frontispiece with a likeness of his subject. 
We are fortunate enough to possess one of Abra- 
ham ; and in it a likeness more to be depended on 
than those of the Pharaohs the Egyptians have 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 17 


left us carved on their tombs, or the marble busts 
of the Czsars that adorn the galleries of Rome. 
We have pictures of Jesus, of his mother, and of 
his Apostles, before which Popish devotees are 
wont to kneel and worship. Like a coarse daub of 
the Virgin which I saw hung above an altar in 
Brittany, with an inscription bearing that it was 
the work of St. Luke’s own hand, all these are 
impudent forgeries—lies through which Rome at 
once imposes on the credulity, and raises money 
from the superstition, of her followers. Our like- 
ness of Abraham is a genuine one; he indeed being 
the only Scripture character, or rather the only 
character in all ancient history, of whose portrait 
so much can be affirmed. We have it not in any 
antique sculpture or painting, but in a form more 
true and faithful. He lives in the well-known and 
characteristic features of his descendants. 

Types of Christ’s blood-bought Church, his race 
have suffered, and also survived, the changes of 
four thousand years—the saying that described 
their early being equally applicable to their later 
history: this namely, “The more they were 
afflicted, the more they multiplied and grew.” 
With a tenacity of life unexampled in the history 
of any other people, and which proves them to 
have been God’s peculiar care, nor Babylonian, 
nor Assyrian, nor Grecian, nor Roman, nor long 
centuries of Christian oppression has been able to 
destroy, or even to absorb them. Clinging as 
tenaciously to each other as to their faith, they 
have lived, wedded, died, buried among themselves ; 
mingling as little with other nations as oil with 
the water amid which it floats. We, for example, 

3 : 


18 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


are a mixed race; so mixed that the blood of 
Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, 
meets and mingles in our veins. Not so the Jews. 
It is nigh four thousand years since Isaac and 
Ishmael met to lay their father in his rocky tomb, 
yet the blood of Abraham flows as pure in the 
veins of his Hebrew children as when it first sprang 
from its source. This is plain from the very re- 
markable similarity they bear to each other—a 
resemblance so remarkable, that whether he is an 
old clothes-man or a courtier, a distinguished 
singer or a dirty beggar, one who pants under an 
Indian sun, or wraps his shivering form in arctic 
furs, walks on ’Change a prince of merchants, or 
keeps a booth in the foul purlieus of London, or 
the still fouler Ghetto of Rome, there is no mis- 
taking an Israelite. His features, if not his speech, 
bewray him. Not only so, but we recognize these 
features in the world’s old paintings, those which 
represent the manners of ancient Egypt, and the 
events of time—not far remote from Abraham’s 
own day—when Pharaoh, to use the words of 
Scripture, ‘‘made the children of Israel to serve 
with rigor, and made their lives bitter with hard 
bondage, in mortar and in brick.” 

In all ages the Jews have been, and in all coun- 
tries are still, so like each other, that we may 
safely infer that their original was like them. It is 
impossible to account for this identity of features 
otherwise than that they bear their father’s image ; 
that Abraham’s features are repeated and multiplied 
in theirs. Any person, as I know from experience, 
by observing the remarkable resemblance among 
all the copies of some famous statue —the Apollo 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 19 


Belvidere for instance, or Venus de Medici, is able 
to form, before seeing it, a very correct conception 
of the original. Even so, since with a few excep- 
tions, all Abraham’s descendants, ancient and 
modern, in this and every other country, bear quite 
a remarkable resemblance to one another, we may 
certainly conclude that in the Jew we have a faith- 
ful portrait and a living likeness of his great 
progenitor. 

This speculation may not seem very compliment- 
ary to the patriarch ; associated in our minds as 
the Jewish features are with the selfishness, and 
insatiable avarice, and low cunning for which his 
descendants have been for ages a hissing and a 
by-word. These have begotten prejudices against 
their type of features as strong almost as those felt 
by many against the negro and colored races—of 
which I could not give a more striking illustration 
than is to be found in the paintings of the old 
masters. It isa remarkable fact that though our 
blessed Lord was a Jew, they never give Him 
the features of his race; but, asif they sought 
thereby to increase our horror of their crimes, 
reserve these for Iscariot who betrays Him, and 
for the priests, who eye the Man of Sorrows 
with scowling and malignant looks. Yet this 
is a mere prejudice; and, like that felt against 
the colored races, is due, as it becomes us to 
recollect, to circumstances more discreditable to 
Christians than to Jews, to those who feel the 
prejudices than to those who suffer from them. 
The case of the Jews, in fact, is in many respects 
parallel to that of the negro races. Robbed for 
long centuries of their rights as men, regarded with 


20 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


undisguised aversion, treated with every possible 
indignity, and everywhere most cruelly oppressed, 
what is bad in their character has been the inevi- 
table result of circumstances, in which others, not 
their own choice, placed them; and for such as 
made either them or the negroes what they now 
are, to abuse and despise them for being so ‘s to 
add insult to injury, and to cruelty the grossest 
injustice. Like their countryman in the parable, 
they have fallen among thieves; and such as 
cherish the prejudices with which they have been 
long regarded, resemble more the priest and Levite 
that passed on the other side than that good Sa- 
maritan who took compassion on the bleeding 
wretch, and poured wine and oil into his cruel 
wounds. Where the Jews have got a fair chance, 
they who have kept separate have exhibited an- 
other property of oil—they have risen to the top. 
Brought under Christian influences, they who re- 
tain the features of the patriarch’s face have ex- 
hibited some of the noblest features of his 
character; by the one as much as by the other 
proving their honorable lineage, and their right 
to say, ‘‘ We have Abraham for our father |” 

It may be noticed as a curious and interesting 
fact, that while Abraham is seen to this day in the 
features which characterize Jewish men, the very 
remarkable beauty of his wife often presents and 
repeats itself in Jewish women. Beauty, no doubt, 
is always a fading charm, and to its envied possessor, 
in many cases, a fatal one. Yet it is a good gift 
of God; and, whether found in human beings, or 
in the plumes of a bird, the colors of a flower, or 
the glowing tints of an evening sky, is a source of 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 21 


mnecent pleasure; nor can it be wrong to notice 
that which men inspired of the Holy Ghost not 
unfrequently mention. They tell us, for instance, 
that ‘‘ Rachel was beautiful,” and that ‘‘ Esther was 
fair and beautiful.” They celebrate the charms of 
Abigail; and not confining their remarks to female 
peauty, they tell us that he whose appearance won 
the hearts of the maids of Israel, and whose brave 
battle with the giant formed the burden of their 
songs, ‘‘ was of a beautiful countenance.” 

What David gave to Absalom, his guilty and 
unhappy son, he probably inherited from his own 
mother. Any way, it is plain from Scripture that 
while some races are almost hideous from their 
ugliness—one of the fruits of sin—the Jewish women 
were remarkable for their personal charms; and 
indeed it is alleged that some of the finest speci- 
mens of female beauty are still found among them. 
This is more than a curious fact. It forms one of 
those indirect proofs of the truth and divinity of 
the Bible, which, though indirect, are not the less 
but the more valuable. The fountain corresponds 
with the stream: the ancient record with present 
physiological facts. For it would appear from the 
Bible that Sarah, the mother of those lovely 
women, was perhaps the greatest beauty the 
painter’s art has preserved, or poets have sung. 
Her charms were so remarkable that they dazzled 
the eyes of Egypt ; and so enduring, that at an age 
whose wrinkles and gray hairs make other women 
venerable, she retained all the bloom and loveliness 
of youth. 

Water, whether it springs on the shore or bubbles 
in the mountain well, where the eagle dresses her 


22 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


plumes and the red deer slake their thirst, never 
rises higher than its fountain: and if, in like man- 
ner, children’s mental powers form a standard 
whereby to judge of their parents’, we must believe 
Abraham, judging from his descendants, to have 
oeen in mind, as well as in piety, one of the great- 
est of men. Take, for instance, a skull of each of 
the different races of mankind, and placing them at 
random on a table before an anatomist, ask him to 
select that which indicates the highest mental 
capacity. Without knowing anything whatever of 
their history, from what graves they were obtained, 
or to what branches of the human family they 
belonged, he lays his hand at once on the skull of 
the Jew. This, take it for all in all, is the best on 
the table. Vastly superior to those of the aborig- 
ines of Australia and ancient Peruvians, that, 
though separated by a great gulf from the animal 
creation, stand at the bottom of the human scale, 
it is visibly superior to the skulls of those Greeks 
and Romans that in ancient, and also of those 
Teutonic races that in modern, times have marched 
at the head of civilization, and seem destined to 
rule the world. The star of Abraham is in the 
ascendant here. However morally debased, the 
Jew stands pre-eminent for his mental powers, and 
has retained his superiority in circumstances which 
have degraded other nations almost to the level of 
beasts. Amid the fire that has burned for ages, 
this bush remains unconsumed. Here, then, is a 
race which, after suffering oppressions and degrada- 
tions sufficient to crush the very soul out of them, 
is mentally second to none, perhaps superior to 
any. This is a remarkable fact. It proves what 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 23 


the Bible leads us to believe, that a special Provi- 
dence watches over the outcasts of Israel, preserv- 
ing them for some great end. And it proves 
more—this namely, that Abraham, “the hole of 
the pit out of which they were dug, the rock out of 
which they were hewn,” their great progenitor, was 
no common man; but one who stood, as well in 
point of mental ability as of faith and piety, “ head 
and shoulders ” above the mass of men. 

This may correct some erroneous notions, which 
many, misunderstanding the language of Scripture, 
entertain regarding the government of God. He 
had a great work to do on the earth, and in Abra- 
ham He selected a great man to do it : an instru- 
ment eminently adapted to accomplish his end. 
This is, so to speak, God’s ordinary rule. Anything 
else is exceptional. Having great ends to accom- 
plish, did He not in old times select great men to 
do them in the cases of Moses, of Joshua, of David, 
of Daniel, of Paul; and in later times in the cases 
of Luther and Bishop Latimer, of Calvin and John 
Knox? Apart altogether from their piety, these 
all were men of pre-eminent natural abilities. 
They were the foremost of their time. No doubt 
God can work by many or by few: smite a giant 
with a pebble from a stripling’s sling, or scatter a 
host by the flashes of a lamp and the blare of an 
‘ empty trumpet; and for the very purpose of 
reminding men that though Paul plant and Apollos 
water, the increase is with Him, in saving souls as 
well as in ruling the destinies of the world, He 
occasionally selects the weakest instruments to 
accomplish the greatest ends. But such is not 
God's ordinary practice. They altogether misread, 


24 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


or misunderstand, his Word who think otherwise. 
How much such ideas are due to men’s greedy 
selfishness or their supineness, I will not undertake 
to say. But it is not true that any one will do for 
God’s work; and that, while great sacrifices are to 
be made for secular objects, and the most brilliant 
talents secured for secular offices, the service of the 
King of kings, the offices of the sanctuary, the 
pulpit, the missionary field, the Sabbath-schooi, 
may be left to pious weakness. Such an idea 
compliments God’s power at the expense of his 
wisdom—it being the part of Divine as well as of 
human wisdom to select the means best fitted for 
the end in view. 

Before proceeding to the grand moral and reli- 
gious features of the patriarch’s character, J] would 
draw an inference of considerable practical import- 
ance from the case of Abraham, and of almost all 
those men who have left a broad mark on their 
own and on future ages. These cases prove that 
God ordinarily works out his purpose by means, 
and not by miracles—not aside from, but according 
to, the regular course of nature. Therefore should 
his Church seek to enlist the highest genius on her 
side. Her duty is to remove, in the position or 
poverty of such as minister at her altars, those 
obstacles which unquestionably deter many enter- 
ing who would adorn her pulpits, and prove of the 
highest service to the cause of Christ. To win 
souls and advance his cause in an indifferent and 
hostile world, let Hannahs give their Samuels, and 
Jesses their Davids. And acting with the wisdom 
of Saul, who, whenever he found a valiant man, 
took him into his service, let the Church, on 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 25 


finding talents associated with piety, take them 
into her service—enlist them in the sacred cause 
of Him who crowns all his other claims on us with 
this, He spared not his own Son to save us. 


ABRAHAM'S CALL. 


The history of infidelity, were it written, would 
present a succession of ignominious defeats ; defeats 
due not to any want of ability in those who have 
assailed the truth, but to this, that its defenders 
have driven them out of all their positions. The 
history, the morality, the theology, the consistency, 
the authenticity, and genuineness of the Bible, the 
truth of its prophecies and the very possibility of 
its miracles, have been all attacked—each in its 
turn, and with the same result. We have seen the 
soldier return from the fields of war with scars as 
well as medals on his breast ; but our religion has 
come out of a thousand fights unscarred, from a 
thousand fires unscathed. She bears no more evi- 
dence of the assaults she has sustained than the 
air of the swords that have cloven it, or the sea of 
the keels which have ploughed its foaming waves ; 
than some bold rocky headland of the billows that, 
dashing against it in proud but impotent fury, have 
shivered themselves on its sides. With few excep- 
tions the writings of infidels have sunk into entire 
oblivion. Their names, and those of their authors, 
are alike forgotten. Notsothe name of Jesus, of 
Him Voltaire boasted he would crush; not so the 
Word of God—the blessed book which is the world’s 
most precious treasure, and often man’s only solace, 
as well in palacesasin cabins. While the works of 


26 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


once famous sceptics are left to rot on bookshelves, 
where the moth devours their memory and the 
spider wraps them in her web, every year sees the 
Bible translated into some new tongue,,acquire a 
greater influence, and receive a wider circulation. 
Fulfilling its own glorious predictions, it is bringing 
nearer the appointed time when, rising over all 
opposition like a flowing and resistless tide, the 
kaowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the 
waters the channel of the deep. 

One wonders how the men who now assail our 
faith can hope for success where Hobbes and 
Bolingbroke, Voltaire and Rousseau, David Hume 
and Gibbon, giants in genius and in intellect, 
totally failed. Christians, possessing their souls in 
patience and peace, may calmly contemplate the 
puny assaults of modern infidelity. There is little 
in these to fill our camp with alarm, or make its 
Elis tremble for the ark of God. Assailing the 
faith from new ground, infidelity undertakes to 
prove the Bible false from its alleged discrepancy 
with the phenomena of Nature and the discoveries 
of science. But a few years, we doubt not, will 
show that though she has changed her ground, she 
has not changed her doom. He that sitteth in the 
heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them ir 
derision. Science may, as science has already 
done, guide us to a sounder understanding of some 
things inthe Word of God. While she corrects any 
mistake into which the interpreters of Scripture 
have fallen, there is nothing to dread. Why do 
the heathen rage? The only result of using the 
facts of science to undermine the foundations of 
religion, will resemble that wrought by some angry 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 27 


torrent when, sweeping away soil and sand and 
rubbish, it lays bare, and thereby makes more 
plain, the solid rock on which the house stands, 
unmoved and unmoveable. 

The man who attempts to build a pyramid on 
its apex would not act more absurdly than some 
modern philosophers—so called. They base the 
most extravagant theories on grounds utterly in- 
adequate to support the ponderous superstructure. 
Propounding doctrines concerning our origin op- 
posed to the Bible, and destructive of our dearest 
hopes, they ask us to embrace them on grounds 
such as no judge and jury would attach the least 
weight to in a court of law. On grounds so feeble 
and puerile, and in plain opposition to the facts 
related in the opening pages of the Scriptures, they 
assert that our origin was in a monkey, or rather in 
a monad. Believe them, and man reached his 
present condition by a process of development 
which required millions of years ere it carried him 
up through the stages of insect, fish, reptile, bird, 
and beast, to the supremacy he enjoys, the height 
he now stands on. Others, not prepared to commit 
themselves to such extravagant vagaries, but ani- 
mated with a spirit of equal hostility to the Chris- 
tian faith, assert on grounds equally weak, if not 
equally ludicrous, that though our first appearance 
was not in the form of a monad, an oyster, or a 
monkey, it was in the form of a savage. Believe 
them, and man’s primeval state was not one from 
which he fell, but from which he rose—one, in fact, 
of lowest savagedom. And, however widely these 
opinions differ, if either of them be true, farewell to 


28 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


our fondest hopes, and our faith in Scripture as the 
Word of God. 

In regard to the latter of these views—for the 
first we may pass by as the ravings of philosophy 
run mad—it is opposed to the oldest and universal 
traditions of the world. These afford abundant 
evidence that the history of man does not present 
a being rising from a lower to a higher condition ; 
but the reverse. Examine the legends of the rudest 
tribes ; and they will be found to contain memories, 
though misty, of a past but higher and nobler state 
of being—of arts, of accomplishments, of a refine 
ment of manners, and of, in many instances, a 
purity of morals which only exist among them 
now in tales and songs. Not tradition only, but 
all history besides, proves that man, left to his own 
resources, has not risen but invariably sunk in the 
scale. The bias to this, which we explain by the 
Fall, may have been corrected in certain instances 
by providential and preternatural causes. But who 
examines the records of nations will find that the 
tendency of morals has always been to become 
more corrupt, and the tendency of religions to 
become more idolatrous and impure. They exhibit 
a constantly increasing departure from the truth. 
In proof of this I appeal to the history, among 
extinct rations, of Greece and Rome; and, among 
existing ones, of India and China. Trace their 
morals and religion upwards, and as we advance 
nearer to their source, we find the one becoming 
less impure, and the other less untrue, until a 
period is reached when the resemblance between 
these and the morals and religious belief of the 
patriarchs is striking, is indeed quite remarkable. 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 29 


It is like ascending a river whose waters are pol- 
luted by the towns and manufacturies that have 
sprung up on its banks—the nearer we approach 
the green hills where it springs from its fountains, 
the purer runs the stream. Man, unaided and left 
to his own resources, has never risen from a lower 
to a higher state. On the contrary, we find the 
vices which early ages discountenanced and for- 
bade, becoming not only universally practised, but 
even shamefully deified ; and the one God of man’s 
first pure faith multiplied into hundreds, in some 
cases into thousands, and in a few even into mil- 
lions, of inferior and usually immoral divinities. 
These remarks, which are not inapplicable to the 
present times, and which may help to reassure the 
hearts of some seized with unnecessary alarm, have 
been suggested by the fact that Abraham’s imme. 
diate ancestors were idolaters. What a rapid de- 
clension this! and what a remarkable illustration 
of man’s tendency to sink rather than to rise in the 
scale of moral and intellectual being! Almost ere 
the gray fathers of the flood were dead, ere perhaps 
the marks of its awful ravages had vanished from 
the face of the earth, mankind had forgotten its 
lesson, and begun to worship the creature in place 
of the Creator. Abraham certainly was the son of 
an idolater; and, if old Jewish and Mahometan 
traditions are to be believed, of one who was a 
maker as well as a worshipper of idols. ‘‘ Your 
fathers,” said Joshua to the people of Israel, ‘‘ dwelt 
on the other side of the flood, even Terah the father 
of Abraham, and the father of Nahor; and they 
served other gods.” Ur of the Chaldees was the 
home of the patriarch’s race ; and the religion they 


30 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


professed was the Sabian—a faith of Eastern. birth, 
and one which presents idolatry in its oldest and 
least offensive form. 

No man becomes at once, and of a sudden, either 
a fiend or a saint. His descent into a lower, like 
his ascent to a higher condition, is gradual— 
always accomplished, though more rapidly in some 
cases than in others, step by step. Of this the 
history of idolatry presents a striking instance. 
Look back on Greece and Rome! _ There, in 
Bacchus, and in Venus, and in other divinities, we 
see how men, as they do still in India, made gods 
of the vices which they practised ; not only glory- 
ing in their shame, but throwing the halo of re- 
ligion around the grossest immoralities. But 
mankind had not sunk so low as this, nor become 
worshippers of stocks and stones, of birds, beasts, 
and creeping things, in the days of Abraham. 
That Sabian faith in which he was born, and which 
his fathers followed, and which still lingers on 
earth among the Parsees of Bombay, was the least 
gross of all idolatries; the one into which man 
first fell, and was most prone to fall. The idolatry 
of this religion began with the worship, not of 
false gods, but of Jehovah, the one, living, and 
true God—under the symbols of the heavenly host. 
That, man’s first declension, and downward step, 
was one to warn us; but not much to wonder at. 
Even in these last days, with God’s Word in our 
nands, amid the full blaze of Gospel light, we find 
it difficult to walk by faith and not by sight ; and 
the corruptions which Popery has engrafted on 
Christianity, the eyes of her devotees turned on cross 
and crucifix, the walls of her churches crowded with 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 31 


images, prove how prone man is to lapse into 
a sensuous religion, and to seek by means of some 
visible object to fix his wandering thoughts and 
inflame his cold devotions. For this purpose the 
sun, moon, and stars—especially the first of these 
—were chosen as images, visible symbols of the 
invisible God. It was in this character that the 
sun_at least in the first instance, was worshipped. 
And certainly if God was to be adored through 
symbols, none could be found so appropriate as that 
imperial luminary, the ruler of the seasons, the 
source of all light and heat, the very life of nature, 
which, clothing the forests anew each year with 
leaves, the pastures with grass, and the fields with 
corn, resumes his daily course with unabating 
vigor, shows no sign of growth or of decay, and 
throned in heaven, shines down from its azure 
heights with resplendent, dazzling glory. 

This, the earliest, was certainly the least gross 
of all idolatries. But that soon befell it which has 
happened to the images of the Roman Catholic 
and the pictures of the Greek Church. The sign 
came to usurp the place of the thing signified. 
Ere long it was not the Being symbolized, but 
the symbol itself, that was regarded as an object 
of adoration. And now, when the Church ot 
Christ has her course to steer between Rationalism 
on this hand and Ritualism on that, let not the 
Bible only, but the history also of this earliest and 
least gross idolatry, warn her against setting much 
store on symbols, or leaning towards a sensuous 
worship. The tendency of every such worship is 
to become more sensuous ; to depart further and 
further from the simplicity ot the Gospel. 


32 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


It was out of the Sabian religion, as well as out 
of Ur of the Chaldees, that Abraham was called. 
The Jews, and the Mahometans also, have curious 
legends about his conversion and the sufferings he 
had to endure for the truth. They say that, when 
he was, according to some, fourteen, according to 
others, forty years of age, his mind took a religious 
turn. At this time, observing a star when night 
overshadowed him, he said, ‘‘ This is my Lord !” 
but, keeping his eye on the luminary, and observ- 
ing it sink ere long, he abandoned all faith in it, 
wisely remarking, “I like not gods which set.” As 
the night wore on and left him in painful perplexity, 
the moon rose up in silver splendor. He turned 
to her, with the delighted exclamation, “ This is my 
Lord !” But following in the wake of the star, she 
also set ; and when her bright rim dipped below 
the horizon, with her set his faith in her divinity. 
By-and-by, from the purple east, the sun leapt up, 
illuminating the heavens with splendor and bath- 
ing the world in light. All his dark doubts now 
scattered with the morning mists before its beams. 
“This,” exclaimed Abraham, throwing himself 
down to worship, ‘‘ This is my Lord!” But when 
hours had rolled on, the sun also began to sink; 
and when, following star and moon, it vanished 
from his gaze, old legends tell how Abraham rose 
from his knees to cast aside the faith of his fathers, 
and worship Him who alone rules both in heaven 
and in earth. 

Nor is this all these old legends tell us concern- 
ing Abraham on his being converted from idolatry. 
He is said to have taken advantage of the absence 
of his people to enter their temple, and, sparing 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 33 


only the biggest of their idols, break all the rest in 
pieces. Discovering, on their return, the havoc 
which had been wrought, the people were roused 
to frenzy. They cried, Who hath done this to our 
gods? and on being told that it was Abraham, 
they exclaimed, Bring him forth! Hast thou done 
this to our gods? they said. Nay, replied he in 
mockery, Nay, the biggest of them hath done it, 
but ask them! Thou knowest, was their answer, 
that these speak not. Abraham now had them in 
a corner. To this very point he had wished to 
lead them. So, turning on them, he demanded, 
Do ye then worship, besides God, that which can- 
not profit and cannot hurt you? fie on you! Burn 
him ! burst from the lips of these early persecutors, 
these fathers of the Inquisition. And the old 
legends go on to tell how a fiery furnace was forth- 
with kindled ; and how this bold witness for the 
truth was cast among the roaring flames ; and how 
he came forth unhurt—God having spoken out of 
heaven saying, O Fire, be thou cold, and a preven- 
tion unto my servant Abraham ! 

The Bible is silent as to the manner, and means, 
and time, of Abraham’s conversion. But, whatever 
these might be, the work was divine—wrought in 
his heart by Him who gave his servant grace to 
rise at another call, and go forth, he knew not 
whither ; an exile from his native land, to wander 
in a land of strangers. Let it be remarked that in 
whatever manner he was called and converted, his 
case presents a remarkable example of the sove- 
reignty of divine grace. We are to remember that 
the true religion was not altogether extinct in 
Abraham’s day. Like stars shining, one here and 

3 


34 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


another there, through the clefts and openings of a 
cloudy sky, like those Alpine summits whose snows 
I have seen glowing in rosy sunlight when all the 
valleys lay wrapped in the sombre shades of even- 
ing, there were families at that time of general 
idolatry where God was worshipped, not only in 
spirit, but in truth. Such was Job’s, for instance. 
It is highly probable that he lived about the same 
period as Abraham. There is no allusion to be 
found in the Book which bears his name to any of 
those remarkable events which distinguished the 
exodus of Israel; and we may therefore conclude 
that his era was not coeval with that of Moses, but 
preceded it. But there are plain allusions in that 
Book to the Sabian worship, to the adoration of the 
heavenly bodies ; and this makes it highly probable 
that Job lived about Abraham’s time, and among 
those whose religion corresponded with that of his 
compatriots. While that is highly probable, this is 
certain, that Melchizedec, whom Abraham met, and 
to whom he paid tithes, was a worshipper of the 
true God ; and that those among whom this myste- 
rious personage filled the office of a priest, must 
have been so likewise. Yet, passing by these, God 
repairs to a family of idolaters, and out of them 
selects a man to be the father of his people, and 
the great progenitor of his incarnate Son. Verily 
his thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways 
as our ways. His grace is free, as the wind that 
bloweth where it listeth ; and here, as in many 
other cases of conversion which present most 
unlooked-for results, we see that ‘‘ the first are last 
and the last are first.” Abraham is a childless 
man, and God chooses him to be the father of a 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 3, 


mighty nation; Abraham is an idolater, and God 
appoints him conservator of true religion and the 
ancestor of the world’s Redeemer. By this early, 
as by many other signal acts of free, sovereign, and 
almighty grace, how does God teach men never to 
despond, or to despair? His way is in the sea and 
his path in the mighty waters: nor can we know 
what purposes he intends to serve by us: what 
usefulness may be ours; what honors may await 
us ; to what blessings and blessed work we may be 
called. ‘‘ He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, 
and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill, that he 
may set him with princes, even with the princes of 
his people. He maketh the barren woman to keep 
house, and be a joyful mother of children. Praise 
ye the Lord !” : 


ABRAHAM'S TEMPER OR DISPOSITION. 


In this aspect of his character Abraham was 
more like Jesus Christ, stood nearer the most 
illustrious of his descendants than perhaps any 
man; than any at least I have seen, or have read 
of. What acontrast he offers to those sour, selfish, 
narrow-minded, mean, greedy, grasping, ill-tem- 
pered, or ill-conditioned Christians who present 
religion in a repulsive rather than in an attractive 
aspect, ever reminding us of the saying, The grace 
of God can dwell where neither you nor I could ! 

Where, for example, shall we find such a pattern 
of Courteousness as Abraham offers for our imita- 
tion? It is the noon-tide hour, when, in hot 
southern lands, labor, which begins with the first 
blush of dawn, takes a pause and breathing-time. 


36 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Abraham sits in his tent-door enjoying its grateful 
shade, and looking out on the plain of Mamre, 
from which the sun’s fiery beams have driven men, 
bird, and panting beasts to such shelter as rocks, 
and trees, and tents afford. He descries three men 
approaching ; making for his tent, toiling along 
under the broiling heat. Strangers, neither clans- 
men, nor neighbors, nor friends, they have no 
claim on him. He may wait their approach, 
leaving them to solicit his hospitality. Not he. 
Abraham rises, nay, he runs to meet them; and 
mingling respect with kindness, courtly manners 
with the most benevolent intentions, he bows him- 
self to the ground. Not one who says, The favor 
which ts worth the giving is worth the asking, he 
anticipates their request, and makes offer of his 
hospitality. But they may fear being burdensome 
to him. So, to remove any reluctance on their 
part to accept his kindness, he makes light of it— 
speaking of what he was about to offer as no tax 
on his generosity, as but ‘“‘a morsel of bread.” 
Nor is this all. With that delicate regard to 
others’ feelings which true kindness prompts, he 
would make it appear that they will oblige him 
more by accepting, than he does them by offering, 
his hospitality. ‘‘My Lord,” he says, addressing 
him who appeared the chief man of the three, “My ° 
Lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass 
not away, I pray thee, from thy servant; let a 
little water be fetched and wash your feet ; and 
rest yourselves under the tree; and I will fetch 
a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts— 
after that ye shall pass on.” And ina short while 
—for Sarah and the servants are hastily summoned 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 37 


from their different occupations to supply the 
wants of the strangers—the three are seated at an 
ample board, Abraham giving the finishing touch 
to his courtesy by respectfully standing beside his 
guests while they eat. Throughout the whole 
transaction, he presents a beautiful model of what 
was once understood by that excellent, though now 
much misapplied term, ‘‘a gentleman.” This is 
what every Christian should be. Modern use has 
greatly perverted the words gentleman and gentle- 
woman from their original and excellent meaning. 
What they indicate cannot be conveyed by a 
patent of nobility. It belongs to no rank. It is 
the ornament of the highest, and should be the 
ambition of the humblest. The temper and man- 
ners these terms express are compressed into this 
one brief exhortation of the Apostle, ‘‘ Be courte- 
ous.” Courteousness is a Christian duty; and 
nowhere can a better example of it be found than 
in this story—the eight verses of Genesis which 
relate it containing a better lesson on true polite- 
ness than the whole volume of ‘‘ Lord Chesterfield’s 
Letters to his Son.” 

Abraham’s Generosity, a still higher virtue, is 
equally remarkable. In proof of that, look to the 
manner in which he treated Lot, his nephew. 
Early deprived of a parent’s care, fatherless, if not 
also motherless, Lot is, I may say, adopted by 
Abraham—received into his nest, taken under his 
sheltering wing. Not so unhappy as some who 
have had no other return for such kindness as he 
rendered Lot than the basest, blackest ingratitude, 
whose lives have been embittered and their bosoms 
stung by those they had kindly nursed. still Abra 


38 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


ham’'s connection with Lot cost him much care and 
trouble. Quarrels arose between their servants, 
and matters at length came to this pass—that they 
must part. Now, there can be no doubt that Lot 
lay under the strongest obligations to Abraham. 
It was his part to accept his uncle’s judgment in 
this juncture, and leave to his decision their 
separate paths in life. The patriarch had been a 
father to him—a friend kinder than many fathers. 
Besides, Abraham was the elder of the two, and 
also the greater of the two: more than that, the 
land of Canaan, which was Lot’s ouly by sufferance, 
was his by promise. Abraham might have said to 
Lot,“ You have no right whatever to this land, toa 
foot of it; go in peace, but seek your portion else- 
where. Such is my decision; and, remember, I 
have power to enforce it.” Yet the uncle gener- 
ously bestows on the nephew a share of his own 
property ; more than that, as if he were the younger 
and also the weaker of the two, as if the land of 
Canaan had been promised to the other rather than 
to him, as if he had been the party who had 
received rather than conferred favors, in determin- 
ing their respective positions Abraham leaves the 
choice to Lot. He will take Lot’s leavings. ‘Let 
there be no strife, I pray thee,” says this right noble 
man, “between me and thee. Webe brethren. Is 
not the whole land before thee? If thou wilt take 
the left hand, I will go to the right; or if thou 
depart to the right hand, I will go to the left.” 
What self-denial, self-control, self-sacrifice, in that 
speech! What liberal and magnanimous gene- 
rosity his! What a model of a Christian this man! 

Men often do wrong by insisting on their rights. 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 39 


Far be that from Abraham. He seeks not his 
own, but the things of others; and here offers 
one of the costliest sacrifices ever laid on the altar 
of peace. This sacrifice, be it remarked and re- 
membered, did not go without its reward. Abra- 
ham tound it ; as, I cannot doubt, he very sensibly 
and very gratefully felt on that eventful morning 
when, standing on Bethel’s rocky heights, he turned 
his gaze from the plain—Lot’s choice—all smoking 
like a burning furnace, to the green hills around 
dotted with his flocks, to his herds safely browsing 
on the dewy pastures, and to the tents below, 
where his family were reposing beneath the shadow 
of the shield of God—every head laid on its pillow 
of sweet sleep and peace. Still, as then, let me 
add, good men will, and shall sooner or later, 
profit by every sacrifice they make for peace. Let 
us “seek peace and pursue it.” 

But never did Abraham, or any one else, present 
a finer model of disinterested generosity and true 
nobility of mind than he, amid scenes that usually 
inflame the worst and most selfish passions of our 
nature. He stands on a field strewn with the 
ghastly dead ; the air is filled with the shouts of 
conquerors and the groans of captives ; a rich spoil 
lies scattered at his feet ; his cheek is still red with 
the flush, and his sword with the blood of battle— 
and his bearing there offers an example of one of 
those bright gleams which occasionally relieve the 
horrors and gild the lurid clouds of war. A man 
of peace, the battle was not of his seeking. But 
the news had reached his tents that Lot and his 
family are prisoners. The tidings awaken all his 
old affections. His trumpet sounds to arms. Lot 


40 STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


must be rescued. With more than three hundred 
retainers following his banner, he pushes on at 
their head; overtakes the foe; and, throwing 
himself on their ranks, achieves a surprise, a rescue, 
and a signal victory. By the rights of war the 
spoil, at least the greater part of it, falls to him; 
and therefore the King of Sodom, content to get 
back his subjects, and perhaps the captives to 
boot, says, ‘‘Give me the persons and take the 
goods to thyself.” He might have doneso. Many 
would have done so—all, indeed, who, taking 
advantage of forms of law, and regardless of justice, 
gratitude, and the claims of others, insist on their 
legal rights. Not so did Abraham. What a 
rebuke his conduct administers to such mean and 
mercenary spirits! What an example his of that 
high Christian principle that sets humanity and 
justice above mere legal claims—the law of God, 
in fact, above the law of man—and scorns to touch 
what the latter may through its imperfections 
grant, but a higher law, the golden rule, “As ye 
would that others should do unto you, do ye also 
unto them,” forbids a man to take. With a single 
eye to the glory of his God and the just claims of 
the unfortunate, Abraham gives up his legal rights ; 
and to the King of Sodom returns this magnani- 
mous answer, “‘I have lift up mine hand unto the 
Lord, the most high God, the possessor of heaven 
and of earth, that I will not take from a thread to 
a shoe-latchet, lest thou shouldest say, I have 
mace Abraham rich.” Here is a pattern to copy! 
Playing as high-minded a part as this grand old 
patriarch, equally well illustrating the Christian 
maxim, ‘‘ Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 41 


ye do, do al! to the glory of God,” how would we 
adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour ? 

The Tenderness of Abraham’s heart is as re- 
markable as the loftiness, purity, and sternness of 
his virtue. Sodom was a sink of iniquity. Abra- 
ham could not but know that, and could not but 
hold the habits of its people in unutterable abhor- 
rence. Yet see how he mourns its doom: regard- 
ing its sinners with such pity as filled the eyes of 
Jesus, and drew from his heart this lamentable 
cry, ‘‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how would I have 
gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her 
chickens under her wings, but thou wouldest not !” 
There have been men, even women, who went 
sternly to the work of executing God’s judgments 
—cutting away the foul cancer from the breast of 
society with unflinching nerves, with an eye that 
knew no pity and a hand that did not spare. 
‘Blessed above women,” sung Deborah, “shall Jael, 
the wife of Heber, be. She put her hand to the 
rail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer, 
ind with the hammer she struck Sisera, and smote 
off his head ; and so let all thine enemies perish, O 
Lord.” What a contrast to that strong iron heart 
the tenderness of Abraham’s! Sodom awakens all 
his pity. Considerations of its enormous guilt are 
swallowed up in the contemplation of its impending 
joom. Truest, tenderest type of his own illustrious 
Son, with the spirit that dropped in the tears and 
flowed in the blood of Jesus, he casts himself 
between God’s anger and the guilty city. He asks, 
he pleads, he prays for mercy—not that the 
righteous only be saved, but that the wicked be 
spared for the sake of the righteous. In his anxiety 


42 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


to save their lives, he imperils his own; stands in 
the way; braves and encounters the danger of 
turning the Avenger’s sword on himself. Once, 
and again, and again, he puts God’s long-suffering 
patience to the trial. He detains Him; keeps 
Him listening to new pleas and requests. Like 
the gallant crew who, moved by the sight of 
drowning wretches that hang in the shrouds and 
stretch out their hands for help, after repeated 
failures to make the wreck, venture life-boat and 
lives once more amid the roaring breakers, Abra- 
ham cries, ‘‘Oh, let not my Lord be angry, and I 
will speak yet but this once; peradventure ten 
shall be found there ?” 

Like some tall mountain whose top catches the 
beams of the morning sun ere he rises on the lower 
hills and sleeping homesteads of the winding val- 
leys, this patriarch, as he saw Christ’s day, seems to 
have caught Christ’s spirit, efar off. Surely his was 
the Spirit of Christ—that mind of which it is said, 
“ Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he 
is none of his.” Compassion, pity, love for sinners, 
than these there is no surer mark and test of true 
religion. May they be found in us as in Jesus 
Christ !—as in Abraham !—as in him, perhaps the 
greatest of all the patriarch’s merely human de- 
scendants, who, penetrated with compassion for his 
guilty, unhappy countrymen, wrote, “I lie not, my 
conscience also bearing me witness, that I have 
great heaviness and sorrow of heart, for I could 
wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my 
brethren |” 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 43 


ABRAHAM’S FAITH AND PIETY. 


In a clear wintry night, when planets, constella- 
tions, and all the orbs of heaven are sparkling 
through the frosty air, we see how, as Paul says, 
“one star differeth from another star in glory.” 
But though some are larger and much more lumi- 
nous than others, which, now caught, now lost, seem 
but points of light, not a few appear equally bril- 
liant. Of these rivals that are flaming and wheel- 
ing in different quarters of the firmament, it were 
hard to say which is pre-eminent—the biggest, 
brightest gem in the dusky crown of night. This 
difficulty is one we do not meet on opening the 
Bible at the eleventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle 
to the Hebrews. With examples of faith, extend- 
ing all the way down from the remote days of 
Abel to those last times when the saints of God 
were stoned and sawn asunder, tempted, and 
slain with the sword, it presents a bright and 
glorious spectacle. We gaze on that firmament, 
if I may so speak, which shines above the Church 
through the long dark night of time ; and which, 
as the night wears on, grows more and more re- 
splendent with those whom God is calling up to 
shine in heaven as the stars forever and ever. 
History contains no catalogue of equally illustrious 
names. It relates no such famous deeds as stand 
recorded in that grand chapter. But though these 
stars of the Church resemble those of the material 
heavens in this, that one differeth from another 
in glory, they differ in this, on the other hand, 
that for the power, grandeur, and, in whatever 
aspect indeed it be regarded, for the greatness of 


44 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


his faith, the severity of its trial and the brilliancy 
of its triumphs, Abraham shines pre-eminent. He 
has no equal, no rival. To change the figure, he 
holds such pre-eminence among these grand ex- 
emplars of trust in God and faith in his unfailing 
word, as does the centre mountain among the 
group above whose rocky pinnacles and snow-clad 
summits it rears its imperial dome. 

Compare Abraham with some, or with any one, 
of the worthies whose names are embalmed in that 
chapter. Take Moses. Who am I that I should 
go unto Pharaoh? he said. With the rod in his 
hand that he had already seen changed into a liv- 
ing serpent, and that was hereafter to change rivers 
into blood and the bed of ocean into dry land, 
Moses shrank from the dangerous task; he hesi- 
tated, conjuring up difficulties and urging objections 
till the Divine anger was kindled against him. 
Take Gideon. Oh, my Lord, wherewith shall I 
save Israel? he cries. Behold, my family is poor 
in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s 
house And saying so, there he stands on the 
threshing-floor, nor leaves it for a nobler sphere 
till miracles strengthen and sustain his faith—till a 
bowlful of water is wrung from the fleece around 
which all the ground lay dry; and on another 
morning the fleece lies dry on meadows sparkling 
with dew, by bushes hung thick with diamonds. 
And to mention but one other, though not the 
least of the worthies enrolled in that chapter, take 
David. See how he staggers beneath his load! 
Look at him repairing for safety and sheltet to the 
Philistines, as if God had ever given his enemies 
occasion for the taunt, Where is now thy God? 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND 9F GOD. 45 


Yet, trusting them rather than Him who had deli- 
’ vered him from the paw of the lion, and the paw of 
the bear, and the hand of the giant champion 
whom he encountered with no other weapon than 
sling and pebble, he flies to the country of the Phi- 
listines, and throws himself into their arms—dis- 
trusting God, and crying, I shall now perish one 
day by the hand of Saul ! 

Look now at Abraham’s Faith! It stood the 
test of much severer trials. He is called to leave 
his country and his kindred—called to go he knew 
not where ; called to be he knew not what. Nor ° 
does he hesitate. He instantly responds ; repairs 
to Canaan ; and lives and dies in the confident be- 
lief that it shall belong to him and his. Yet he 
found no place there to rest the sole of his foot—his 
weary foot—but was tossed about during a long 
lifetime here and there, like a sea-weed which is 
floated hither and thither on the wandering billows, 
cast on the shore by this tide and swept away by 
that. Looking not at the things which are seen, 
but at the things which are not seen, the life of all 
pelievers is more or less one of faith. But of 
Abraham and his whole life in the land of Canaan, 
xf every journey he undertook, every march he 
made, and every footprint he Jeft on its soil or on 
its sands, it might be literally as well as figuratively 
said, it was true of him in respect of this world as 
well as of the next, as it never was of any other 
man, “‘ He walked by faith and not by sight.” 

This faith culminates on Moriah—the Mount 
where, laying Isaac on the altar, it endures its 
greatest trial, and achieves its greatest triumph 
It furnishes the only key to the questions that rise 


46 STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


unbidden as we read the story—a fond and doting 
father, how could Abraham undertake the dreadful 
task? how was he able to contemplate embruing 
his hands in the blood of his son? how did his 
reason withstand the shock ? how did his heart not 
break? how had he nerve to disclose the dreadful 
truth to Isaac, to kiss him, to bind his naked limbs, 
to draw the knife from its sheath, and raise his arm 
for the blow ? how did not the cords of life snap 
under the strain, and Abraham, spared the horrid 
sacrifice, fall dead on the altar—a pitiful sight, a 
father clasping within his lifeless arms the beloved 
form of his son? It is by the power of faith he 
stands there, the knife glittering in his hand, his 
arm raised to strike—the conqueror of nature. The 
blow shall make him childless, yet he believes that 
he shall be the father of a mighty nation; that 
when the flames have consumed the loved form at 
his side, Isaac shall rise from their ashes ; and that 
after this bloody tragedy and greatest act of wor- 
ship, with Isaac restored to his arms, as they 
climbed, they shall descend the Mount together. 
Who can help exclaiming, O Abraham, great is 
thy faith ! 

“By faith,” says St. Paul, “‘ Abraham, when he 
was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that had re- 
ceived the promises offered up his only-begotten 
son, of whom it was said, In Isaac shall thy seed be 
called—accounting that God was able to raise 
him up even from the dead.” It is thus he explains 
the scene on that mysterious and awful Mount 
where, in the victim unbound and a divinely pro- 
vided substitute bleeding in his room, Abraham 
saw Christ’s day afar off, and was glad. Thus the 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 47 


Apostle, magnifying the power of faith, and show- 
ing how to him who believeth all things are pos- 
sible, teaches us to cry, Lord help mine unbelief! 
increase my faith! It is certain that in respect 
of this crowning grace, Abraham offers us the 
grandest model, presents an all but perfect ex- 
emplar. In Paul’s catalogue of immortals he shines 
the star of greatest magnitude ; and with a change 
of sex, to him we may accord this palm, this 
highest praise, ‘‘Many daughters have done vir- 
tuously, but thou excellest them all !” 

Yet the patriarch had his failings—as who has 
not ?>—and they are written to warn ‘him who 
thinketh he standeth, to take heed lest he fall.” 
If thou hast run with the footmen and they have 
wearied thee, how, asks the prophet, canst thou 
contend with horsemen? Yet, strange to say, 
though Abraham contended successfully in the 
race with horsemen, distancing them all, he was 
outstripped by footmen. He trusted God to restore 
the life of his son, yet did not trust Him to protect 
the honor of his wife. Telling a lie about Sarah, 
he failed in the very grace for which he was most 
distinguished. Should not these things teach us 
to watch and pray that we enter not into tempta- 
tion ; and never under any circumstances to forget 
the warning, ‘‘Be not high-minded, but fear”? 
When Nehemiah, bold as a lion, said, ‘‘ Shall such 
a man as I flee?” how much more might we have 
expected Abraham to say, ‘Shall such a man as I 
lie?” His faith failed him. This great and vene- 
rable patriarch stands convicted of a mean equivo- 
cation. And who that sees him vainly trying to 
gloss over his shame, can help exclaiming, Lord, 


48 STURIES OF CHARACTER. 


what is man? Surely the best and worst of men 
have but one refuge—the blood and righteousness 
of Jesus. 

Another practical and equally important remark 
we may draw from Abraham’s history, ere he 
leaves the stage to give place to his servant— 
‘whom we shall next introduce. Paul explains the 
patriarch’s pre-eminent triumph by his pre-eminent 
faith. But what explains it? What fed the faith 
wherein his great strength lay? Challenging com- 
parison with any, and excelling all, in that grace, 
we may justly apply to him the glowing terms 
and bold figures of the prophet—‘‘ He was a cedar 
in Lebanon, with high stature and fair branches, 
and shadowing shroud—the cedars of God could 
not hide him—the fir-trees were not like his 
boughs, and the chestnut-trees were not like his 
branches, nor was any tree in the garden of God 
like unto him for beauty: his root,” he adds, ex- 
plaining how this cedar towered above the loftiest 
trees, giant monarch of the forest, “his root was 
by the great waters.” And what that root found 
in streams which, fed by the snows and seaming 
the sides of Lebanon, hottest summers never dried 
and coldest winters never froze, the unequalled 
faith of Abraham found in close and constant 
communion with God. Like Enoch, he walked 
with God. Each important transaction of life was 
entered on in a pious spirit, and hallowed by re- 
ligious exercises. His tent was a moving temple. 
His household was a pilgrim church. Wherever 
he rested, whether by the venerable oak of Mamre, 
or on the olive slopes of Hebron, or on the lofty, 
forest-crowned ridge of Bethel, an altar rose; and 


ABRAHAM THE FRIEND OF GOD. 49 


his prayers went up with its smoke to heaven. 
Such daily, intimate, and loving communion did 
this grand saint maintain with heaven, that God 
calls him his “friend ;” and honoring his faith with 
a higher than any earthly title, the Church has 
crowned him “Father of the Faithful.” He lived 
on terms of fellowship with God, such as had not 
been seen since the days of Eden. Voices ad- 
dressed him from the skies; angels paid visits to 
his tent ; and visions of celestial glory hallowed 
his lowly couch and mingled with his nightly 
dreams. He was a man of prayer, and therefore 
he was a man of power. Setting us an example 
that we should follow his steps,—thus, to revert 
to language borrowed from the stateliest of 
Lebanon’s cedar, thus was he “‘fair in his greatness 
and in the length of his branches, for his root was 
by the great waters.” 


50 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Gliezer the Pattern Serbant. 


THE French have established a diligence that 
starts from the sea-coast at Beyrout, and now 
climbing the steeps and now winding through the 
picturesque valleys of Lebanon, descends after a 
long day’s journey on the city of Damascus. This 
city is a point of interest to every traveller who 
visits the Holy Land ; nor any wonder, since there 
are points, not a few, in which it claims pre- 
eminence over any other place in the world. 

Akin to the veneration with which the men of 
his day regarded Methusaleh, hoar with the snows 
of nine hundred sixty and nine years; with which 
we ourselves should gaze on the oldest living man ; 
which I felt on looking even on the ruins of a 
decayed but living yew, that, a sapling at the date 
of David’s battle with Goliah, was a great tree, 
mantled in the mists or white with the snows of 
our hills, that winter night the Saviour was born— 
akin to this is the feeling with which an intelligent 
and thoughtful traveller must tread the streets of 
Damascus. Said by Josephus to have been founded 
by a great-grandson of Noah, and certainly spread- 
ing along the banks of Abana at the time Abraham 
entered the land of Canaan, Damascus is the oldest 
existing inhabited city of the world. Of all those 
that were coeval with it, it only stands. The hand 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 51 


of Time, committing its ravages less suddenly but 
no less surely than the flood that swept away 
Enoch, the first city, as it did Eden, the first 
garden in the world, has left no other memorial ot 
these than their names in the page of history, or 
some desolate and lonely ruin. It is not so with 
Damascus. Long anterior to the building either 
ef Athens or of Rome it was a busy city ; and, 
sole survivor of a remote antiquity, it is a busy 
city still. How great its age! It boasts of streets 
along which the tide of human life has ebbed and 
flowed for nearly four thousand years. Were the 
title one which could be properly applied to any 
place but heaven, not Rome, but Damascus, should 
be called ‘‘ The Eternal City.” 

Singularly interesting to antiquaries on account 
of its extreme antiquity, this city presents also 
features of peculiar interest to men engaged in the 
pursuits of trade; whether they be the arts of 
peace or war they cultivate. Famous during long 
ages for its silk manufactures, it gives its own 
name to a fabric which is esteemed of superior 
richness and value—damask being called so from 
the circumstance that it was invented in Damascus, 
and first woven in its looms. Its weapons of steel 
were even more famous than its webs of silk. 
Happy the man in battle who carried a Damascus 
blade; no other place forging swords of such 
exquisite temper. I know not, but probably the 
Bible alludes to the superior excellence of these 
where it says, “‘ Shall iron break the northern iron 
and the steel ?” I once happened to see this steel 
put to the test. It was in France, and in the 
chemistry class of the Sorbonne. In the course of 


52 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


a lecture on iron, Thenard, the professor, produced 
a Damascus blade, stating that he believed that 
these swords owed their remarkable temper to the 
iron of which they were made being smelted by the 
charcoal of a thorn-bush that grew in the desert. 
To put it to the trial, he placed the sword in the 
hand of a very powerful man, his assistant ; desiring 
him to strike it with all his might against a bar of 
iron. With the arm of a giant the assistant sent 
the blade flashing around his head, and then down 
on the iron block, into which, when I expected to 
see it shivered like glass, it embedded itself, quiver- 
ing but uninjured ; giving, besides a remarkable 
proof of the trustworthiness of the sword, new force 
to the proverb, True as steel. 

But Damascus, which her poets dignify with the 
title of ‘‘ Pearl of the East,” presents attractive 
charms to travellers that have no stake in trade, 
and feel no interest in antiquarian studies; for, 
besides being the oldest, it is in some of its aspects 
the most beautiful of cities. With its white towers 
and minarets shooting up through groves of green 
palms into the transparent air, it lies within sight 
cf the snow-crowned Hermon; reposing at the 
feet of a grand mountain range, and encircled by a 
zone of gardens and of orchards of variously tinted 
foliage and the finest fruits. Its plain is watered 
by Abana and Pharpar. These rivers, reckoned by 
the Syrian leper better than all the waters of Israel, 
rush forth from their mountain gorges to be parted 
into a thousand streams, foaming onward in their 
course, dance and sparkle in bright sunshine, and 
cover the soil on their banks with a carpet of 
flowery verdure. No city in the world is more, 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 53 


perhaps none is so worthy of the encomium which 
the pride and patriotism of the Jews pronounced 
on their Jerusalem, “ Beautiful for situation, the 
joy of the whole earth.” Travellers have used the 
most glowing terms and exhausted the powers of 
language in their attempts to describe its charms ; 
but no expression can give us so vivid an idea of 
them as the part Mahomet acted, when, a camel 
driver traversing the neighboring mountains, he 
stood in the gorge where the city first burst on his 
view. Rapt for a while in astonishment, he gazed 
on the wondrous scene, but by-and-by recovered 
himself; and fearing, should he venture down into 
the city, that its charms would seduce him into for- 
getting the vast schemes of his life, he turned 
aside, and passed on, saying, with a self-denial and 
determination of purpose Christians would do well 
to imitate, Wan can have but one paradise, and 
mine ts fixed above. 

Legends also cling to Damascus and the places 
around, which invest them with no ordinary in- 
terest. The origin and foundation of the city are 
lost in the mists of ages, but there is a common 
belief that he who looks on its lovely plain sees 
the cradle of the human race; and that it was from 
its red clay soil that God formed the first man, 
and also gave him his name of Adam—which is, 
being interpreted, red clay. If this is true, it im- 
parts an air of probability to another of their 
legends, this, namely, that it was near Damascus 
that Abel fell a victim to his brother’s envy, and 
his blood went up to heaven for vengeance on 
earth’s first, if not worst, murderer. Here, on one 
of the mountain heights to the west of the city, is 


54 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the place, it is said, where Abraham stood on that 
eventful day, when, following with anxious eye the 
setting course of star, and moon, and sun, he aban- 
doned their worship for that of the true God; and 
there, down on the plain in yonder vast mound, 
is the sepulchre of Nimrod—that mighty hunter 
before the Lord, who, as the founder of Babel, looms 
so large through the mists of four thousand years, 
the first of earth’s old great monarchs. 

These traditions, however interesting, may pos- 
sibly be mere fancies ; although in a sackful of such 
legends there are almost always some grains of 
truth. But though these were ranked with the 
“ Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” there are facts 
associated with Damascus which, after Bethlehem 
and Jerusalem, invest it with greater sacredness 
than any other spot on earth. It is interesting 
as the home of Naaman the Syrian; him who, 
advised by a captive girl that had compassion on 
her master, repaired to Israel, and lost both his 
pride and leprosy in the waters of the Jordan. It 
is interesting as the city from whose gates the 
proud armies marched forth, over which God 
wrought some of his greatest triumphs on behalf 
of his ancient people; striking that host of a 
sudden with blindness, and this with such a panic, 
that with Benhadad at their head, and two-and- 
thirty allied princes swelling the rout, they fled 
like sheep before a handful of the warriors of 
Israel. It is interesting to the students of Scrip- 
ture through its association with the two greatest 
of the prophets. Probably Elijah, but certainly 
Elisha, walked its streets. God had sent him 
there : and there he unveiled such a future of crime 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 55 


and cruelty before Hazael, that, hardened sinner 
as the soldier was, he started in horror from his 
own image, exclaiming, ‘‘Is thy servant a dog, that 
he should do this thing?” But what especially 
makes Damascus interesting and “ holy ground ” is 
that it formed the scene of an event which, in its 
influence on the world, takes rank next to the 
birth and death of the Son of God. It was nigh 
to this city the great Apostle of the Gentiles was 
converted. And what man occupies such a place 
in sacred history as he; did so much in his life- 
time, or has done so much by his writings, to 
proclaim and propagate the Gospel? This “ chief 
of sinners,” as he humbly, penitently called himself, 
was unquestionably the chief of Apostles ; in writ- 
ings, as in labors and in trials, more abundant 
thanthem all. Nextto Jesus Christ, whose “name 
is as ointment poured forth,” and than whose there 
is no other name given under heaven whereby we 
can be saved, no name on earth, in the homes of 
the godly, is such a “household word” as Paul’s; 
and in heaven, next to our Redeemer, I can believe 
him to be regarded with more universal interest 
than any one else in glory. How many have his 
pleadings moved ; how many hearts have the arrows 
from his quiver pierced; to how many have his 
words brought life and comfort ; and how many 
saints strengthened thereby have entered the dark 
valley singing his own grand song, “O death, 
where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 
The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is 
the law: but thanks be to God who giveth me the 
victory through my Lord Jesus Christ”? There, 
the light shone that paled a noonday sun, and the 


56 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


darkness fell that issued in quenchless light, and 
Jesus last visited our world to convert his greatest 
persecutor into his greatest preacher. For these 
reasons Damascus will ever be among the sacred 
places which a Christian would like to visit. 

The reputed birthplace of Adam, and certainly 
the spiritual birthplace of Paul, perhaps the 
greatest of his sons, this city gave birth to another 
man, of whom, and of whose remarkable virtues, 
it has no reason to be ashamed. Domestic servants 
form a very large, a very useful, and a very impor- 
tant class in society; and it can boast of having 
given birth to one who occupies a place of as great 
pre-eminence among them as Paul perhaps did in 
the Apostleship of the Church. And so, appreci- 
ating the higher virtues, however humble the 
sphere be which they adorn, more than for its 
beauty of situation, more than for its famous 
fabrics, more than for its hoar antiquity, I regard 
Damascus with interest as the birthplace of him 
whose name stands at the head of this chapter— 
the steward of Abraham’s house, as his own master 
calls him, ‘‘ This Eliezer of Damascus.” 

Consider his position in life-——He was a servant. 

He belonged to a class which the Bible highly 
honors, and by which it should be highly honored 
in return. Gratitude for the estimation in which it 
holds those whom many despise, and for the eleva- 
tion to which it has raised them it found treated as 
slaves and trodden in the dust, requires that. The 
oldest, truest, and best of books, this Book, for the 
rules it supplies for this life and the hopes it pre- 
sents of a better one, is adapted to all classes of 
society ; and should be equally valued by all. This 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 57 


was well expressed by two very different, but 
both impressive, scenes. There, in yonder palace 
where a royal lady, about to leave our shores and 
rise in time to the position of a queen, receives a 
deputation. They have come to offer her, in the 
name of the women of our country, a parting 
marriage gift. It is no costly ornament, fashioned 
of gold and flashing with precious gems—diamonds 
from Indian mines, or pearls from the deep, such as 
the wealth and willingness of the donors could 
have purchased. A healthy sign of the age, anda 
noble testimony to its religious character, the gift 
is a copy of the Holy Scriptures—this, as in long 
centuries hence it will be told, was the marriage 
gift it was thought worthy of a Christian nation to 
bestow, and worthy of a royal princess to receive. 
And there also, on yon stormy shore, where, amid 
the wreck the night had wrought, and the waves, 
still thundering as they sullenly retire, had left on 
the beach, lies the naked form of a drowned sailor 
boy. He had stripped for one last, brave fight for 
life; and wears nought but a handkerchief bound 
round his cold breast. Insensible to pity, and 
unawed by the presence of death, those who 
sought the wreck, as vultures swoop down on their 
prey, rushed on the body, and tore away the 
handkerchief: tore it open, certain that it held 
within its folds gold ; his little fortune ; something 
very valuable for a man in such an hour to say, I'll 
sink or swim with it. They were right. But 
it was not gold. It was the poor lad’s Bible—also 
a parting gift, and the more precious that it was a 
mother’s. j 

Equally suited for a royal princess and a cabin- 


58 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


boy, and all indeed upward from the broad base to 
the apex of the social pyramid, the Bible deserves 
to be held in higher esteem by no class than by 
servants. There is none in the world on which it 
bestows a higher honor; to whom indeed it ad- 
dresses a call so high and noble—it being to 
servants, or rather, for such were most of those 
whom he addressed, to slaves, the Apostle says, 
“ Adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour.” He 
who so orders his life and conversation as to bring 
no dishonor or reproach on religion, who gives no 
occasion to its enemies to blaspheme, nor by his 
falls and inconsistencies furnishes scandals to be told 
in Gath and published in the streets of Ashkelon, 
does well. He may thank God that, amid life’s 
slippery paths he has prayed, nor prayed in 
vain, “Hold up my goings that my footsteps slip 
not.” He does better still in whose life religion 
presents itself, less in a negative and more in a 
positive form. For, while it is well to depart from 
evil, it is better to do good; nor does he live in vain 
who exemplifies by his daily life and conversation 
the pure, and virtuous, and holy, and beneficent, 
and sublime, and saving doctrines of God his 
Saviour. The first is good: the second is better: 
but the last is best of all. So to live as to be 
beautiful as well as living epistles of Jesus Christ, 
seen and read of all men—so to live as to recom- 
mend the truth to the admiration and love of 
others—so to live as to constrain them to say, 
What a good and blessed thing is true religion !— 
as in some measure to win the encomium of her, 
who, looking on Jesus, exclaimed, ‘“‘ Blessed is the 
womb that bare thee, and the paps that gave thee 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 59 


suck !”—so to live, in fact, as to resemble those 
books which, in addition to their proper contents, 
are bound in gold, are illuminated, and illustrated 
with paintings: or those pillars which, while like 
their plainer neighbors supporting the superstruc- 
ture, are also its ornaments, rising gracefully from 
the floor in fluted columns, and crowned with 
wreaths of flowers,—this is best of all. 

A Christian can aspire no higher. And let it be 
remembered that for a work so sacred Paul singles 
out servants. It is not kings on their thrones, nor 
lords in their castles, nor high dignitaries of Church 
or State, but these, the humble denizens of the 
kitchen, the sun-browned laborers of the cottage 
and fields, whom he calls, not merely to exemplify 
or illustrate, but to adorn the doctrine of God their 
Saviour. Let others respect them; any way, let 
servants respect themselves. Such honors have 
not all his saints. Ample compensation this for 
what the world regards as their humble position— 
as it were to the lark, could she be dissatisfied with 
her grassy nest, to think that though no singing 
bird has such a lowly home, none soar so high as 
she, or sing so near to the gates of heaven. Eliezer 
belonged to this class; and is a grand pattern to 
all servants who are seeking through grace to fulfil 
their high calling and adorn the doctrine of God 
their Saviour. It will be my aim to set him forth 
in this light as we proceed. Meanwhile I go on to 
show that his condition in life was below even 
that of a servant, as we understand the term. My 
object in this is not to detract from, but rather add 
to, our admiration of the man, such a circumstance 
being calculated to bring out his merits all the 


60 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


more plainly, as the dark cloud on which they are 
painted does the colors of a rainbow, or its foil 
the brilliancy of a precious gem. 

Servants, in our sense of the term, are those 
whose skill, time, and labor are their own pro- 
perty. Disposing of these for a longer or shorter 
period at their own free will, and as they judge 
most to their advantage, they belong to them- 
selves ; and need call no man master, unless they 
choose, and as they choose. The few excepted 
who, having inherited or acquired a fortune, are 
independent of the gains of labor, there is hardly 
any class that enjoys such an amount of freedom 
as domestic servants. Few, on the whole, are so 
well off: and, did servants sufficiently appreciate 
the advantages they enjoy under a kind, Christian 
roof, none have more occasion, from a sense of 
gratitude to God, so to demean themselves, and 
discharge the duties of their calling, as to “adorn 
the doctrine of God their Saviour.” With wages 
adequate to their present, and, unless wasted on 
vanity, to their prospective wants, found in food 
and many of the comforts of life, they enjoy free- 
dom from cares that press on the heads of the 
house, and may sing at their work like birds who 
have their wants supplied, though they neither 
sow nor reap.’ Their business binds down many 
other classes to one spot, as their roots do the trees 
to the soil ; but servants enjoy a freedom approach- 
ing that of the denizens of the air—‘ The world is 
all before them, where to choose.” 

The fisherman is bound to the sea-shore; the 
shepherd to the lonely hills ; the ploughman to the 
glebe ; the merchant to the busy town; lawyers to 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 61 


the neighborhood of courts ; shopkeepers are nailed 
to their counters; pastors have to move, as they 
should shine, within the orbits of their congrega- 
tions ; and thousands of our artizans, panting to 
breathe fresh air and glad their eyes with green 
fields, have to live amid the smoke of furnaces and 
the ceaseless roar of machinery. Many are, but 
many more may be called, slaves to business. So 
unlike slavery, however, is the condition of our 
servants, that numbers of them acquire the restless 
habits of the nomade races, of gypsies or Tartars. 
They roam from one situation to another, shifting 
with every shifting term—an abuse of their liberty 
much to be regretted. Reducing the value of char- 
acter, and leading to license of life and manners, 
this habit proves most unfavorable both to their 
moral and material interests ; presenting in a class 
in whose welfare all should take a kind and Christian 
interest, too many illustrations of the proverb—‘‘ A 
rolling stone gathers no moss.” 

Eliezer had no such opportunities of abusing 
liberty. He was not a servant in our sense of the 
term. As Abraham’s other servants, and indeed 
almost all servants in those days were, he was a 
slave—and that such was the true condition of the 
patriarch’s servants is plainly indicated by what is 
told us of the three hundred armed followers whom 
he summoned to his standard on hastening to the 
rescue of Lot—this, namely, that they ‘‘ were born 
in his own house.” It proves nothing to the con- 
trary that this man, holding a high place in his 
master’s house, was one whom Abraham trusted 
with his confidence, whom he employed in import- 
tant domestic affairs, and whom, indeed, he at one 


62 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


time probably intended to constitute his heir. It 
was not an uncommon thing in those days, when 
slavery was a comparatively mild and gentle servi- 
tude, for such as had been bought and sold to rise 
in the changes of fortune from the bottom to the 
very top of her wheel. Witness Esther’s romantic 
and splendid history. And to take a case in some 
respects parallel to that of Eliezer, we know that 
he did not hold a more respectable and responsible 
office in the house of Abraham than Joseph held in 
that of Potiphar. ‘‘ Behold,” he said, in answer to 
the solicitations of the temptress, “my master 
wotteth not what is with me in the house, and hath 
committed all that he hath to my hand. There is 
none greater in his house than I: neither hath he 
kept back anything from me but thee, because 
thou art his wife. How then can I do this great 
wickedness, and sin against God?” Still Joseph, 
this paragon of virtue, the man who has associated 
his name with the highest recorded example of un- 
tarnished purity and truest honor, was a slave; 
nor is there any reason to suppose that Eliezer 
occupied in Abraham’s household a better position 
than he did in Potiphar’s, who was bought of the 
Ishmaelites, and, shame to say it, had been bought 
by them of his own brothers. 

We defend no slavery: but abhor all kinds of it, 
be it domestic, political, ecclesiastical, or spiritual. 
May God break every yoke! Yet be it observed 
that while Eliezer was in a condition of servitude, 
his, that of patriarchal times, was no such servitude 
as in our days’ has produced the most revolting 
cruelties and unutterable crimes. Then, as is mani- 
fest to any one who reads the books of Moses, the 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 63 


system of bondage—not established by God, but 
only tolerated among his ancient people—had the 
usual severities of slavery so ameliorated, had the 
abuses it is liable to so carefully restrained, and 
had its term in ordinary circumstances so limited, 
that, to quote it either as a sanction or defence of 
modern slavery is wickedly to confound things that 
widely differ. At the same time, I may remark 
that while God, so to speak, winked at slavery—as 
at a plurality of wives, and other customs opposed 
to the spirit of the Gospel—in these early times, 
we see in the very infancy of the system evidences 
of its essentially vicious character. Hercules is 
said to have strangled serpents; but it strangled 
virtue in its cradle. Among those quiet pastoral 
scenes where Jacob’s sons, steeling their hearts 
against his cries and entreaties, sell their brother; 
and in those tented homes, far from the pollution 
and bare-faced vice of cities, where Sarah, and 
Leah, and Rachel dispose, as if they were cattle, of 
the bodies of their handmaids, we see the cropping 
out of a system which has everywhere blighted, 
and blasted, and rudely trampled on the freedom of 
man and the virtue of woman. It has been fully 
developed since then. Look at it under the most 
favorable circumstances! Examine the fruits it 
has borne even in what might be called a Christian 
soil! See fathers selling their children, and worse 
still, debauching their own daughters ; women tied 
naked to the whipping-post, and while they writhe 
under the bloody lash, filling the air and Heaven 
itself with their agonizing cries ; virgiu modesty 
openly scorned; all female virtue and manly re- 
spect crushed out of humanity; the black man 


64 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


degraded into a brute, and the white man changed 
into a monster? And was not a system which 
thus, deepening the degradation and aggravating 
the curse of the Fall, defeated the blessed ends for 
which God’s Son descended on a ruined world, well 
named by Wesley, the sum of all villanies? It was 
next to blaspheming the name of God for its apolo- 
gists and abettors—some of them, alas! ministers 
of the Gospel—to pretend that it had any sanction 
in the Bible, or speak of Eliezer’s gentle, noble, vir- 
tuous, generous, and saintly master as that “ good 
old slaveholder, Abraham.” Happily there is no 
temptation now to call sweet bitter, and bitter 
sweet ; good evil, and evil good. We and our 
brethren in America are done with this great crime ; 
but unhappily neither of us, it would seem, with its 
consequences, though we paid a heavy penalty, 
and they a heavier—the stain that dimmed the 
lustre of their banner-stars not being washed out 
but in a sea of blood. 

In making these remarks, which have been sug- 
gested by the case of Eliezer, I freely admit that 
there were cases, not a few cases perhaps, where 
the natural results of slavery were much modified, 
ifnot altogether neutralized :—cases where masters, 
deploring the existence of what they did not esta- 
blish and could not abolish, ruled with a gentle 
hand ; and, holding themselves responsible to God 
for the duties of their position, won the regards and 
reigned in the hearts of their slaves. And ruling 
like Abraham, such men found among that despised 
and down-trodden race, whom some of our so-called 
philosophers regard, and it is no breach of charity 
to believe would, had they the power, treat, as little 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 65 


better than brutes—examples of affection to their 
master and of fidelity to their trust not inferior to 
that of Eliezer of Damascus. Before I proceed to 
his character, I would give one example, asking 
those who read it to consider if kindness, sympathy 
with their circumstances, forbearance with their 
faults, interest in their welfare, and courteous and 
Christian treatment, could produce such a noble 
character out of negro slaves, how many such might 
they not produce among our domestic servants ? 
On the deck of a foundering vessel stood a negro 
slave. The last man left on board, he was about 
to step into the life-boat. She was already laden 
almost to the gunwale, tothe water-edge. Bearing 
in his arms what seemed a heavy bundle, the boat’s 
crew, who with difficulty kept her afloat in the 
roaring sea, refused to receive him. If he came, it 
must be unencumbered and alone. On that they 
insisted. He must either leave that bundle and 
leap in, or throw it in and stay to perish. Pressing 
it to his bosom, he opened its folds ; and there, 
warmly wrapped, lay two little children, whom 
their father had committed to his care. He kissed 
them ; and bade the sailors carry his affectionate 
farewell to his master, telling him how faithfully 
he had fulfilled his charge. Then lowering the 
children into the boat, which pushed off, the dark 
man stood alone on the deck, to go down with the 
sinking ship, a noble example of bravery, and true 
fidelity, and the “love that seeketh not its own.” 


I lately trrned to the census of 1851 (that of 
(861 not being at hand), to see what light it would 
throw on my remark, that servantsare not only a 

5 


66 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


very important but also a very numerous class of 
the community. For this purpose I turned to the 
details, which are classified under the head of occu- 
pations, to find these, though appearing at first 
sight but a dry list of figures, full ofinterest. In 1851, 
for instance, Great Britain had of boot and shoe 
makers, 274,451; of tailors, 152,672; of cloth 
manufacturers, 137,814. And who can read the 
numbers of these and other workmen without being 
impressed with the importance of securing such a 
secular, and also religious, education to all classes 
of the community as shall make good citizens ot 
all? Neither for their interests, nor for her own, 
can society afford to neglect such formidable 
masses ; especially since they have learned the art 
of banding together, and acting through their 
unions with the weight and momentum of a single 
body. Would that our rulers, in the measures they 
adopted to secure the good order and peace of the 
country, put more faith in the Acts of the Apostles 
than in Acts of Parliament, in Bibles than in 
bayonets, in teachers than in policemen, in schools 
than in jails and courts of justice ! 

Here again appears not so much an evil to be 
guarded against, as a great running sore to be 
healed—a deformity and a danger both. In that 
same year of 1851 there were within our shores no 
fewer than 21,047 vagrants in barns, tents, and 
fields. Wandering hordes, these went to no 
church ; their children were taught in no school; 
begging and thieving formed their chief means of 
livelihood ; a terror to the timid and a burden to 
the industrious, they were savages in a Civilized, 
and heathens in a Christian, land. Recalling the 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 67 


saying of Defoe, “begging is a shame to any 
country—a shame that real objects of charity 
should be compelled, and that those who are not so 
should be allowed, to beg,” this army of vagrants 
is surely a disgrace to our nation—a monstrous evil 
which the government and churches of the country 
should combine their efforts to put down. 

The number of printers, amounting to 26,024, 
presents another and happier feature ; one calcu- 
lated to make us thankful to God for those bless- 
ings of knowledge, both secular and religious, 
which our country so pre-eminently enjoys. What 
floods of light stream from the presses where her 
thousands of printers work! With exceptions not 
worth mentioning, ours is a pure literature ; open- 
ing up paths to virtue, happiness, and usefulness in 
this world, and lighting the steps of many a Chris- 
tian pilgrim to his heavenly home in the next. 

Another and yet more sacred influence for 
good is the pulpit. I have seen a calculation of 
the extraordinary machine and steam powers of 
Great Britain: and it may gratify more than the 
curiosity of Christian readers to see its pulpit 
power as set forth in the following table : 


Olergymen (Epis. Est. Oh.)..................-.. 17,621 
pienisters- IBA PLIGES) sci sian) siate clelstatsafeiainisaicicis sts .- 1,556 
Independent. . 22... ccccc cacccccccess 1,972 

. BYES LELIAMN crolnisie\-\sicisiclas sialsiais v'sie's\sis 2,725 

” WESIB VEEN ciale eos ccelclsle sees Peed A Aes: 

hie Protestants not described............ 1,580 


Leaving out of account a few Unitarians, some 
threescore Jewish, and above 1,000 Roman Catho- 
lic priests, here were not less than 27,252 ministers 
of religion, of whom the great mass were engaged 


68 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


every Lord’s day in preaching ‘Christ and Him 
crucified.” Verily, our eyes see our teachers. 
There is no famine of the bread of life in this 
happy land; nor nowadays “is the sound of 
archers heard at the place of the drawing of water.” 
All the more to our shame, however, that with 
such a vast amount of evangelizing power, our cities 
should present moral wastes, where thousands are 
living, and sinning, and dying without God or hope 
in the world, One great cause of this lies un- 
doubtedly in denominational jealousies ; in those 
who, as servants of the same Master, should com- 
pine for good, as do others for evil, standing aloof, 
and askance. How might the wilderness be turned 
into Eden, were each minister, with his congrega- 
tion, to take a section of the outlying field, and 
apply to it all the powers of a spiritual husbandry? 
Thus—nor is it possible otherwise—might our 
heathen districts be evangelized. No doubt the 
result of such a plan would be to make one 
district assume an Episcopalian, another a Pres- 
byterian, a third an Independent, a fourth a 
Wesleyan character; but made Christian—sitting 
at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in their right 
mind—what of that ?—what though the coat our 
cities wore were like Joseph’s, one of many colors ? 
The statistics which suggested these thoughts, 
while I ran over their columns in search of domestic 
servants, fully warrant what I said of their num- 
bers. With the exception of agricultural out-door 
laborers, who amounted in 1851 to 1,077,627, there 
is no class so numerous. The tables, which, not 
excepting her Majesty from thcir lists, give I queen, 
give 1,000,000 and more, of servants, as follows: 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 69 





Servants, Domestic (general)..............00- 754,926 
Mone hmaws sieves siecle aposiele wean cise oi oie tesla’ erates 7,579 
Cooks 552s sae aa peeteereevelaleteie ce eiale a o/a(a wlacelgeiaets 48,806 
Gardeners. acc se nauieececasisalceis esse. ns ewaligoies 5,052 
GOOT Se eae eRe sac aes. came ee am 16,194 
IIOUSEKEBPEP sate cseicatei clem)= sie eiclelsienies onleesle 50,574 
FOuseMAId 5. carrece ie cheedocites cia sles cesauemee 55,935 
IN UETSO ses) 5 elec oleleere ete ey octal etatetaiclaicinieysuieseldnt wets 39,139 
ANTHNSORVANG sc ce alc tecteiatern ae:sicieisie clieials Sluisieis'é-a/enie 60,586 

1,038,791 


In the light of this prodigious number, of the fact 
that within Great Britain there were in 1851 more 
than ONE MILLION of domestic servants—a mass 
certainly not diminished but increased during the 
last fifteen years—the subject of this chapter as- 
sumes an aspect of immense importance. In this 
view, the pattern of a good servant presents an 
object, if not of higher, of wider and much more 
general interest than even that of a good sovereign. 
And such a pattern we have, as I now proceed to 
set forth, in Abraham’s steward; as his master 
called him, in ‘‘ this Eliezer of Damascus.” 

Other stones besides the key-stone go to form 
an arch; but without it, though formed of solid 
granite, they are useless: no better, be they two 
or two hundred, than as many cobwebs, to sustain 
a building or to span a roaring river. Locking all 
the rest together, it is the key-stone that gives their 
value to the others. Now such is the virtue which 
we assign to fidelity among the qualifications that 
form a good servant, and fit any one, whether fill- 
ing a public or private sphere, for a position of 
trust. The truthfulness that scorns to resort to an 
equivocation or tell a lie, the honesty that would 
not defraud another of the value of a pin, the 


70 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


fidelity, in one word, that, with a single eye to a 
master’s interest, is as diligent and dutiful out of 
his sight as in it, behind his back as before his face, 
this is the first and greatest property of a good 
servant—one, indeed, that in the judgment of 
every reasonable and considerate master will make 
amends for many faults, and be like the “ charity 
that covereth a multitude of sins.” 

The very long period, to apply these remarks to 
Eliezer, during which he held the important office 
of steward in Abraham’s house, proves that he 
possessed this quality in an eminent degree. 
Though frequent change of place, in some instances, 
may be more a servant’s misfortune than his fault, 
it is not without reason that a long period of service 
is regarded as the best proof of fitness and fidelity: 
for though mere talent, or a happy stroke of 
fortune, may raise a man or woman to a position 
of trust, it is only by trustworthiness that they can 
keep it. Some shift at almost every term—floating 
about in society like seaweed, the wrack of ocean, 
that changes its place on the shore at every tide; 
but Eliezer grew gray in the same house, and held 
the same office for at least fifty years. He was 
steward before Isaac was born, and still steward 
when Isaac was married—two events separated by 
nearly half a century. In this point of view he 
should be regarded as a pattern servant ; a model, 
it were as much for the interests of servants as of 
their masters, they more frequently copied. True 
to his earthly, as we all should be to our heavenly 
Master, Eliezer was a ‘‘good and faithful servant :” 
and this, which his long possession of office demon- 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 71 


strates, is beautifully illustrated by an interesting 
chapter in Abraham’s history. 

No man in the Bible plays a more high-minded 
and honorable part than Eliezer—though a ser- 
vant, and in one sense a slave. Fully to compre- 
hend that, and appreciate his fidelity, it must be 
remembered that the birth of Isaac, though a happy 
event to Abraham and Sarah, was far otherwise, in 
a worldly point of view, to him. It inflicted a blow 
on Eliezer, which it needed uncommon magnani- 
mity and piety to bear. Till Isaac appeared, 
this man had good hopes of succeeding to his 
master’s fortune. Such is the way I read, and the 
meaning I attach to, these words of Abraham: “I 
go childless, and the steward of my house is this 
Eliezer of Damascus. Behold, to me thou hast 
given no seed: and lo, one born in my house is 
mine heir’—this Eliezer, one of my slaves, or a 
child of his. This, no doubt, supposes that in lack 
of offspring by Sarah, Abraham intended to set 
aside Lot, his nephew, and also his relatives in 
Mesopotamia—a resolution which, to those who 
are ignorant of Eastern habits, may seem unlikely, 
almost incredible. But it was not so in Abraham’s 
age ; nor is it so still in those regions of the world 
where he lived, and where events are frequently 
occurring to produce a strong impression of the 
fact that it is God who setteth up one and putteth 
down another. There, the revolutions of the wheel 
of fortune are as strange as sudden; raising, as we 
read in the book of Esther, a beautiful slave to 
share his bed and throne with the King of Persia, 
and taxing a man from the gate where he was a 
porter, and even from the foot of a gallows, to 


72 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


make him the first minister of state. In illus- 
tration of that, hear what Forbes says :—It is 
still the custom in India, especially among the 
Mahometans, that in default of children, and 
sometimes where there are lineal descendants, the 
master of a family adopts a slave, frequently a half- 
Abyssinian of the darkest hue, for his heir. He 
educates him agreeably to his wishes, and marries 
him to one of his daughters. As the reward of 
superior merit, or to suit the caprice of an arbitrary 
despot, this honor is also conferred on a slave 
recently purchased, or already grown up in the 
family ; and to him he bequeaths his wealth in pre- 
ference to his nephews, or any collateral branches. 
This is a custom of great antiquity in the East, 
and prevalent among the most refined and civilized 
nations.” 

But the bright prospects which this custom, and 
the future, opened to Eliezer, vanished at the birth 
of Isaac. We cannot doubt that he bore his dis- 
appointment nobly ; and for his dear master’s sake 
welcomed and even loved the boy who had come 
between him and a splendid fortune. And yet one 
hope may still have lingered, and risen sometimes 
unbidden, in his bosom. Might not Isaac choose 
to live unwedded? and die, leaving no heir behind? 
But this expectation, if he ever cherished it, was 
also to be extinguished ; and it was surely no small 
trial to his fidelity when, commissioned to seek 
a wife for Isaaz, Eliezer had, with his own hand, to 
quench his last hope of rising in the world—of 
exchanging poverty for affluence, and a state of 
servitude for freedom. In such circumstances most 
people would have intrusted the office to another 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 73 


agent. Committing it into the hands of one who 
had strong temptation to play his master false, 
Abraham, more than by any language, expressed 
his confidence in the fidelity of his servant; and 
that he believed this Eliezer of Damascus to be 
true as its famous steel. What a pattern of faith- 
fulness the servant in whom his master could repose 
such faith! He was an honor to his class; and 
not to his class only, but to our common nature. 
The case recalls a circumstance that happened in 
our own country, and deserved the admiration with 
which I read it. A lawsuit, breeding its usual 
passions, had sprung up between two neighbors. 
When the time approached for its being heard in 
court, one of the parties called on the other to say 
that he did not think it necessary both should lose 
their time, going each to state his case before the 
judge ; such faith, he said, have I in your integrity, 
and that you will do as much justice to my claims 
as to your own, that I will commit my cause into 
your hands, leaving you, after having stated the 
arguments on your side, to state them on mine. 
What rare and great faithto putinanyman! Yet 
the event justified it; he in whose integrity the 
other reposed such confidence, stating the case so 
fairly that he lost his own cause, and won his 
opponent’s. 

Still more trying were the circumstances in 
which Eliezer justified Abraham’s confidence; 
nobly justified it. Left to manage the affair as he 
deemed best, he selected for presents some costly 
and splendid ornaments ; and attended by a retinue 
‘that indicated both the rank of his master and the 
importance of his mission, this faithful servant 


74 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


bidding a long farewell to all his own hopes of 
greatness, set out for Mesopotamia. Brown with 
the dust, and scorched with the heat, and worn out 
with the toils of a longsome journey, he at length 
arrives within sight of Nahor; and descends to 
water his camels at a well outside the city. It was 
about the evening hour—the time when the sun in 
these hot countries, shining with tempered rays or 
kindling the west with his dying glories, invites 
people to walk abroad, and the world, like a candle 
which blazes up before it expires, for a brief period 
resumes its activity ere it sinks into the repose of 
night. At this hour the women of the city were 
wont to go forth to draw water ; even those of rank 
in these simple and early days preferring work to 
ennui or idleness, deeming it no more dishonor to 
bake bread than to eat it, to make a dress than to 
wear it, to draw water than to drink it—in short, 
thinking it no shame to engage in what we call, 
and many despise as, menial occupations. Know- 
ing this, and that she whom God intends for Isaac’s 
bride may be among the women who shall soon 
come trooping to the well, Eliezer, like a faithful 
servant who thinks more of his master’s business 
than of his own ease, immediately seeks direction 
from God. He casts himself on providence, saying, 
““O Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray thee, 
send me good speed this day, and show kindness 
unto my master Abraham... And let it come to 
pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let 
down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink; 
and she shall say, Drink, and I will give thy camels 
drink also: let the same be she that thou hast 
appointed for thy servant Isaac ; and thereby shall 


i 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 75 


I know that thou hast showed kindness unto my 
_ master.” What an unselfish, noble regard to his 
master breathes out in this prayer; and what 
wisdom also in seeking one for Isaac who, by her 
bearing to himself, should prove herself not high- 
minded, but humble ; not idle, but industrious ; not 
rude, but courteous; not cold, but kind. 

The book of Daniel relates a remarkable instance 
of immediate answer to prayer. ‘‘Whiles I was 
speaking,” says the prophet, ‘‘and praying, and 
confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, 
and presenting my supplication before the Lord 
my God for the holy mountain of my God; yea, 
whiles I was speaking in prayer, even the man 
Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the 
beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me 

. and said, O Daniel .. . at the beginning of 
thy supplications the commandment came forth, 
and I am come to show thee ; for thou art greatly 
beloved.” ‘Greatly beloved” I can believe Eliezer 
also to have been ; for God has no respect of per- 
sons—honoring men, whether they be servants or 
sovereigns, as the spectators do actors on the stage, 
not for the part they play, but for the way they 
play it. His prayer was also promptly answered. 
“‘ Before he had done speaking,” as the Bible says, 
ere the prayer he offered, with his eyes on the city 
gates, had left his lips, a woman comes out; and, 
with form graceful and erect, elastic step, and a 
water-pitcher poised on her shoulder, makes 
straight for the well. Her attire is such as virgins 
wore ; and her countenance, which beams with the 
graces that nor time, nor wrinkles, nor disease can 
efface, is exceeding beautiful,—a woman this to 


76 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


grace Isaac’s house, and tenderly recall to his 
tather’s memory the charms that lay mouldering in 
Machpelah’s cave. Can this lovely vision be God’s 
answer to his prayer? He will try; put it to the 
test he has arranged. Accosting the maiden as she 
leaves the well, he said, ‘‘Let me, I pray thee, 
drink a little water?” Her gracious reply shows 
that his arrow has hit the mark. It is she ; Nahor’s 
daughter. Nor does He who here, as often, proves 
himself forward to answer prayer, however back- 
ward we may be to make it, fail still further to give 
Eliezer ‘‘ good speed.” Isaac’s proxy, he woos and 
wins the maid,—left, as all women should be in a 
matter of such unspeakable importance, to her own 
free choice. Giving her heart with her hand, her 
ready answer to Laban’s question, ‘‘ Wilt thou go 
with this man?” is “I will go.” Eliezer has 
executed his commission. And when in the form 
of a bride, who drops her veil to conceal her 
blushes, he presents Isaac with one of the fairest 
flowers of the East, and not needing marriage 
revels to drown the recollection of his own disap- 
pointment, forgets it in the happiness of his master, 
how does he justify the confidence of Abraham ; 
and prove himself worthy, in a subordinate sense, 
of the eulogium that shall crown the labors of 
every Christian’s life, “Well done, good and faith- 
ful servant !” 

Eliezer’s diligence as a servant is almost as con- 
spicuous as his fidelity in that beautiful history 
which, opening to us many interesting glimpses 
of Eastern and ancient manners, relates how Isaac 
got his wife. There are servants who are honest 
enough, but lazy. They frequently postpone, as 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 77 


alas! too many do in the important affairs of sal- 
. vation, present duties to what they call a more 
convenient season. ‘‘Siothful in business,” they 
go about their work without pith or energy. But 
Eliezer went to his with a will, as they say; nor, 
to use acommon proverb, did he /et the grass grow 
at his heels. On entering Laban’s house, he finds a 
grateful change from the toil and hardships of his 
journey. Servants, summoned to the rites of hos- 
pitality, hasten to undo his sandals and wash his 
feet ; luxurious couches invite him to repose ; weary 
and worn, gladly would he rest ; and poorly sus- 
tained on the pulse and dried fruits that formed | 
the fare of the long journey, nature turns with keen 
appetite to the smoking board that invites him to 
sit down and eat. But, pattern to all of us in the 
highest matters, and to servants in their daily and 
ordinary avocations, he sets the claims of duty 
before all things else. What his hand finds to do, 
this man will do now, and do with all his might. 
He could have found a hundred excuses for delay, 
but listens to none. He rushes on business. As 
if every hour and moment were too precious to be 
lost, he proceeds at once to the matter in hand, 
and says, waving away the feast, ‘I will not eat 
till I have told my errand.” It was his meat and 
drink to do his master’s will. Let it be ours, as it 
was Christ’s, our great exemplar, to do the will of 
our Father in Heaven. 

In coasting along the newly-discovered shores of 
New Zealand, Captain Cook, with that sagacity 
which in the case of John Knox and others was 
mistaken for prophetic power, remarked that the 
time might come when these islands would form 


78 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


one of our most valuable colonies,—gems in the 
crown of Britain. Struck with the richness of 
the foliage and gigantic size of the forest trees, 
he inferred that that must be a deep rich soil which 
bore such magnificent timber. Reasoning after 
this fashion, we might fairly have concluded that 
the extraordinary virtues of Eliezer must have had 
their root in a devout and pious heart. Nay, we 
might have drawn a conclusion favorable to his 
piety from the very character of his master. Abra- 
ham was not less likely than David, and than every 
good man should be, to regulate his household on 
these holy principles, ‘‘ Mine eyes shall be upon 
the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with 
me: he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall 
serve me: he that worketh deceit shall not dwell 
within my house: he that telleth lies shall not 
tarryin my sight.” But Eliezer’s pzety is no more 
than his fidelity and diligence matter of conjecture. 
In this story he appears pre-eminent as a man of 
prayer. He displays an extraordinary confidence 
in the providence and faithfulness of God. He 
casts himself on Him whom he loves to call his 
master’s God, with almost as much faith as his 
master himself could have done. With the first 
dawr: of success, he bows his head, and worships 
the Lord. ‘‘ Blessed,” he cries, ‘‘ be the Lord God 
of my master Abraham, who hath not left destitute 
my master of his mercy and his truth.” Not in 
our judgment only, but in his own, it is not his 
own skill but the Lord who leads him; it is not 
good fortune but the Lord who speeds him; and 
indeed it were difficult to say whether the senti- 
ments he breathes are most fragrant. with piety 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 79 


toward God, or with affection to his master. The 
saying, Like master like man, had never a happier 
or more beautiful illustration than in the venerable 
patriarch and his pious steward. 

Were there more masters like Abraham there 
would certainly be more servants like Eliezer— 
more who would in their honesty, fidelity, and 
piety show the results of a master or mistress’s holy 
example ; the benefits, by some servants too lightly 
esteemed, which may be expected from dwelling 
with a religious family, in a house where the Sab- 
bath is carefully observed and God is daily wor- 
shipped. I have heard servants loudly complained 
of, and unfavorable contrasts drawn between those 
of our own and of older times. I would not 
conceal their faults. Though with a kind hand, 
I would rather lay them bare, that they might be 
amended. Yet, when I have heard some com- 
plaining, for example, of the ingratitude of servants, 
I have been tempted to ask what many of them 
have to be grateful for. They have feelings to be 
hurt as well as others; and how have I seen them 
lacerated and rudely torn! Removed from home 
and friends, they are peculiarly sensitive to kind- 
ness ; but its words in many instances never fall 
on their ear. Affections that, like tendrils torn 
from their support, would attach themselves, in 
lack of father or mother, to master or mistress, 
are left to lie bleeding on the ground ; and in many 
instances are trodden under foot. Far from pa- 
rental care, no kind eye watches over them, nor 
kind voice warns them of the snares that beset 
their feet. Many show no more interest in their 
servants’ souls than if they had no souls to be 


80 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


saved ; and less care is taken to preserve their 
virtue from seducers than the family-plate from 
thieves. They may well ask in such cases, “‘ What 
have we to be grateful for?” I do not defend 
their faults: but, so far as my knowledge and 
experience go, it is but justice to them to say that, 
were more regard paid to the feelings of servants, 
more forbearance shown with their failings, more 
pains taken to make them happy, to keep them 
from the paths of vice, to cultivate their virtues 
and bless their souls, there would be less occasion 
to complain of their depravity, and of the dege- 
neracy of the times. With more holy we should 
have many more happy households, presenting, as 
in Abraham’s, the beautiful sight of pious servants 
and pious masters growing gray together. 

Let me frankly tell servants, on the other hand, 
that they often have themselves to blame. They 
forfeit respect by a miserable aping of the manners 
of their superiors. They waste on their indulgences 
or on vain and showy attire the means which would 
save a parent from the degradation of public cha- 
rity, and provide for the wants of their own old 
age. Yielding to the temptation of higher wages, 
they will leave a Christian house for one where 
they will see no good, but much bad example ; 
imperilling their precious souls, like Lot, when, less 
repelled by its sins than allured by its green and 
well-watered pastures, he “ pitched his tent toward 
Sodom.” If crimes are committed against servants, 
they are also committed by them. Falsehood and 
dishonesty are not the worst they may commit ; and 
the guilt of receiving some simple and unsuspicious 
one into a house to accomplish her ruin, is only 


ELIEZER THE PATTERN SERVANT. 81 


equalled by that of a servant who carries vice 
into a virtuous family, and more wickedly betrays 
her trust than it were to steal down at midnight 
with muffled foot, and open the door to thieves. 
There are many good servants in the world. 
Who would be so, let them take for their directory 
and motives these words of St. Paul: ‘“ Servants, 
obey in all things your masters according to the 
flesh ; not with eyeservice as menpleasers, but in 
singleness of heart, fearing God: and whatsoever 
ve do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not unto 
men: knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive 
the reward of the inheritance, for ye serve Christ.” 
Such God will reward, though they should meet 
here only cold neglect. But since good servants 
are as valuable to a good master as he can be to 
them, they may rest assured that, with the excep- 
tional cases, their virtues will go not unrewarded 
even of men. With all its faults, there has been 
no age of the world in which diligence and fidelity, 
to say nothing of piety, have not been held in high 
esteem. Not the least interesting of the monu- 
ments I saw amid the venerable ruins of Rome 
was one which held within its broken urn some 
half-burned bones. They were the ashes of one, 
who, as appeared from the inscription on the tablet, 
had belonged to Czsar’s household, and to the 
memory of whose virtues as a faithful, honest, and 
devoted servant, the Emperor himself‘had ordered 
that marble to be raised. When wandering among 
the tombstones of a quiet churchyard, nothing has 
pleased me more than to light on one raised by a 
family over the grave of some old faithful nurse, 
or aged retainer of their house ; and near by this 
6 


82 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


“gray metropolis of the north” there lies a ceme~ 
tery, where the traveller who goes to meditate 
among the tombs will find a monumental stone 
erected by our own gracious Sovereign to the 
memory of a faithful servant. Such honors are 
rare; too rare; too seldom bestowed. Let ser- 
vants see to it that they are not too seldom de- 
served; and that, “doing all as to the Lord and 
not to men,” they earn, besides their wages, such a 
character as his master might have engraven on 
Eliezer’s tombstone,—NOT SLOTHFUL IN BUSI- 
NESS, FERVENT IN SPIRIT, SERVING THE LOAD, 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN, 83 


doseph the Successful Man. 


WHATEVER way we turn a diamond, it flashes 
‘out rays of light—of various hues, but all exqui- 
sitely beautiful. Such a gem is the story of Joseph. 
Indeed, it is in many respects unique. A universal 
favorite, one over which gentle childhood bends 
with interest and venerable age with tears, it is 
in some respects as unrivalled in the Bible, as the 
Bible is unrivalled among books. 

Regarded only as a literary composition, with 
what inimitable beauty and pathos is the story 
told? In Jacob’s doting love for the motherless 
boy—the first-born of his beloved Rachel; in the 
wildness of that grief the bloody cloak awoke, and 
sons and daughters rose in vain to comfort ; in the 
rebound of his feelings at the news from Egypt, 
from the unbelief that heard them as too good to 
be true, to the vehement emotion that burst out 
in the cry, ‘“‘Joseph my son is yet alive, I will go 
and see him before I die;” in the wakening up 
of the consciences, the dread and the remorse, of 
the guilty brothers ; in the trembling question, ‘‘ Is 
your father well, the old man of whom you spake ? 
Is he yet alive ?” in the tender recollections that 
woke at the sight of Benjamin, and sent Joseph to 
another chamber to preserve his disguise and 
relieve his heart by a flood of tears ; in that match- 


&4 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


less address of Judah’s when, making us forget his 
crimes and mingle our tears with his, he pleaded 
for the old man’s sake, and offered himself a 
ransom for the trembling boy; and in the events 
that immediately followed the disclosure, when, 
unable any longer to restrain his feelings, Joseph 
tore off the mask, and crying, ‘“‘I am Joseph, your 
brother,” he broke out into such a burst of passion- 
ate emotion that his weeping was heard through- 
out all the house: in these, there are touches of 
nature which the greatest uninspired genius never 
approached—so fine, so true, so tender, that no 
man of ordinary sensibility could read the story 
aloud, but his tongue would falter and his eyes be 
dimmed with tears. 

Considered simply as a story, what novel paints 
scenes more interesting, or relates events so pictu- 
resque and romantic? To apply a common ex- 
pression to this portion of sacred Scripture, it is 
‘eminently sensational :” equally so with those 
highly-seasoned tales which in our periodical 
literature, and especially in the lowest depart- 
ments of it, feed the public appetite for excite- 
ment, wonders, crimes, and horrors. Yet how 
much they differ! Its details are true, while 
theirs are false; and while their tendency is to 
debase rather than improve the taste or purify the 
heart, the history of Joseph recommends itself, as 
I hope to show, by its lofty morality, the spirit 
of piety which it breathes, and the lessons of 
wisdom which it teaches. Seek stories that rouse 
and sustain our interest by remarkable vicissitudes 
of fortune, the play of lights and shadows, sudden 
alternations of sunshine and of storm, scenes both 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 85 


of the wildest grief and of ecstatic joy, hair-breadth 
escapes from horrid crimes, from pit, and prison, 
and deadly perils, where shall we find one to com- 
pare with Joseph’s? No man, I ever read of, had 
such experience of the vicissitudes of life, passed 
unscathed through so many strange and fiery trials, 
met with deliverances so signal, or had more appa- 
rent cause to doubt, and in the end more real cause 
to acknowledge, a presiding providence and the 
goodness of God. 

Passed in quiet studies, or domestic duties, or the 
routine of business, and in the common walks of 
piety, there are many good lives that would make 
very dull books. Hence, though their works may 
be published, and are such that the world would 
not willingly allow to perish, some great men have 
found no biographers. Their lives lacked stirring 
incidents, being marked by none but such as are 
common to humanity. But while their lives re- 
sembled some rich but level country, where cot- 
tages stand embowered amid smiling orchards, and 
village spires and castle towers rise above umbra- 
geous woods, and fields wave with bounteous 
harvests, and fat herds slake their thirst at streams 
which flow between sedgy banks quietly to the 
sea—the life of Joseph is eminently picturesque. 
It resembl:s the scenes that lend their charms to 
the Alps or Apennines, where the thundering 
cataract and foaming torrent alternate with lakes 
that lie asleep in the arms of beauty, where frown- 
ing crags look down on flowery meadows, and 
deep dark valleys are parted by mountains whose 
peaks pierce the azure sky, and, glistening with 


86 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


eternal snows, seem to bear up the vault of 
heaven, 

The interest of such scenes and the pleasure 
they afford is much enhanced if religion lends 
them her dignity, and their physical is associated 
with circumstances of moral grandeur. Such is 
-he case, for example, in the grand valleys of 
Piedmont, the mountain-home of the Waldenses, 
where their fathers prayed and fought for three 
long centuries—so persecuted by bloody Papists, 
that, as one of their historians says, ‘‘ every rock 
became a monument, every meadow saw execu- 
tions, and every village had its roll of martyrs.” 
Even so, the interest of Joseph’s story deepens 
when, penetrating beneath the surface, we discover 
in him a type of Christ, and see how many of the 
events of his life appear to foreshadow some of 
the leading incidents in our Saviour’s. Many are 
the points of resemblance in the histories of Joseph 
and of Jesus. This may be, so to speak, more of 
accident than intention ; yet the analogies between 
the two are remarkable, and will interest and 
instruct us, if they do nothing more. 

Both were the beloved sons of their fathers. 
Both were envied and hated of their brethren. 
Both were the victims of base conspirators. Both 
had a remarkable garment, and were stripped of 
it by cruel hands. Both, though innocent, were 
accused of the foulest crimes. Both were tempted 
to great sins, and both alike recoiled from and 
repelled the tempters—the ‘‘Get thee behind me, 
Satan!” of Jesus recalling Joseph’s words when 
starting back, horror sitting on his face, he pro- 
tested, saying, ‘‘How can I do this great wicked- 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 87 


ness and sin against God?” Both were slain—the 
one in fact, the other in intention. Both not only 
forgave, but saved their murderers. In both cases 
these “thought evil, but God meant it unto good.” 
Joseph’s burial in the pit is a symbol of Christ’s 
in the tomb. He comes from both pit and prison 
a type of Him whom death could not hold in his 
grasp, nor the grave in her ancient fetters. And 
in that young Hebrew whom Pharaoh calls from a 
prison to the palace that he may invest him with 
imperial authority, and commit into his hands 
the management of his kingdom—in the words 
of Scripture, to put his seal on his hand, to array 
him in vesture of fine linen, to put a gold chain 
upon his neck, to make him ride in the second 
chariot which he had, to send heralds before him, 
crying, ‘“‘Bow the knee,’—we see Jesus. Here is 
a type and shadow of our glorified and ascended 
Lord, as He stands at the right hand of God, and 
at the mandate, ‘“ Let all the angels of God worship 
Him,” ten times ten thousand fall prostrate at his 
feet. From Egypt’s streets and palace we are 
carried away to the celestial city—to the scene 
where the four living creatures, and the four-and- 
twenty elders, with harps and golden vials full of 
odors which are the prayers of saints, fall down 
before the Lamb, and sing the new song, saying, 
“Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open 
the seals thereof; for thou wast slain, and hast 
redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every 
kindred, and tongue, and’ people, and nation.” 

In leaving such sacred and lofty topics for that 
feature of Joseph’s life which is indicated in the 
title of this article, it may appear that I am making 


88 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


a great descent. Success is not always another 
term for merit and worth, for excellence of conduct 
and nobleness of character. But however some 
may have climbed up by foul means, marking their 
path with slime, so did not this child, not of for- 
tune, but of God. While its success is one of the 
most remarkable features of Joseph’s career, it was 
won, with God’s blessing, by those virtues which 
form the true foundations of a happy, useful, and 
successful life. It may be to our profit and 
advantage to consider his history in this light. 
Promising before we part to trace his success to 
these, and draw from his career some useful 
lessons, let me now ask my readers to look at 
him as the very type and model of A Successful 
Man. 

The heathens had a goddess whom they called 
Fortune. She is commonly represented standing 
by awheel. From this, which she turns round and 
round, are drawn the blanks and prizes in which 
she assigns their different destinies to men, without . 
any respect whatever to their merits and demerits. 
She could not do otherwise, indeed ; for while her 
hand is on the wheel, a bandage is on her eyes. So 
all things fall out by chance, blind and indiscrimi- 
nating chance,—a man who deserves a prize often 
receiving a blank, while success falls to the lot of 
such as, indolent and unworthy, have no claim to 
reward. 

No picture of the world could be more fallacious. 
Dethroning God, it denies a superintending Provi- 
dence ; and reducing everything to blind fate and 
chaotic confusion, it makes man the sport of ele- 
ments over which neither he, nor any one else, has 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 89 


the least control. In its practical influence this 
doctrine must beeminently pernicious. It weakens, 
or rather destroys, all the springs of activity, and 
furnishes sloth, and self-indulgence, and vice itself 
with a too acceptable excuse. 

Unchristian as it is, this old heathen notion is 
still, and to some extent, current among us. This 
may be owing to those occasional cases where we 
see success attending such as appear to have done 
nothing to deserve it; and where, on the other 
hand, we see meritorious men outstripped by in- 
ferior rivals. From such cases we, ignorant of all 
the circumstances, are apt to draw too hasty con- 
clusions—looking on them with the gloomy eyes of 
him who complained, ‘I returned and saw under 
the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the 
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, 
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet 
favor to men of skill: but time and chance hap- 
peneth to all.” Account for it as we may, Fortune, 
though she has no temple, has still her worshippers. 
More than would be willing to confess it, trust not 
alittle tochance. Reckless or lazy, they hope that 
something will turn up: and to how great an ex- 
tent the old heathen notion still exists, and keeps 
its hold of men, crops out in the terms so fre- 
quently applied to one whose career has been 
signalized by remarkable success. He is called a 
Child of Fortune—a Favorite of Fortune. 

The ideas these terms convey are quite illusory, 
and calculated to have a most prejudicial effect on 
the minds especially of the young—of those who 
have the work and battle of life before them. Not 
more impious, and less pernicious, was the idea 


go STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


expressed in the speech of a Norseman—one of 
that brave, indomitable, self-reliant, battle-fighting, 
sea-subduing adventurous race, to whose blood 
flowing in our veins Britons owe their enterprise, 
the energy which has won brilliant victories in 
fight, and planted prosperous colonies in all quar- 
ters of the globe. Bringing to the work of life an 
indomitable energy, compelling the winds that blew 
around, and the waves that thundered on his stormy 
shores, to waft him on to fortune, the old pagan— 
a skilful seaman, a dauntless soldier, one who had 
cultivated with equal success the arts of peace and 
war, is reported to have said, ‘“‘I believe neither in 
idols nor in demons: I put all my trust in my 
strength of body and of soul!” What a contrast 
to his bold atheism, and also to their confidence 
who trust in the blind throws of Fortune, the lan- 
guage of the pious Psalmist: “‘ God is my strength 
and power, and He maketh my way perfect. He 
teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of 
steel is broken by mine arms. Thou hast also 
given me the shield of thy salvation, and thy 
gentleness hath made me great! The Lord liveth, 
and blessed be my rock; and exalted be the God 
of the rock of my salvation”? Equally enlightened 
and devout were the sentiments of Joseph. A 
Divine Providence is gratefully acknowledged in 
the very names of his children. He calls his first- 
born Manasseh, saying, ‘‘ For God hath made me 
forget all my toil, and all my father’s house ;” 
and enshrining the same acknowledgment in the 
name of his second, he calls him Ephraim, “ For 
God,” he said, ‘‘hath caused me to be fruitful in 
the land of my affliction.” 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. Ol 


These cases, that of David and this of Joseph, 
present, it may be admitted, such remarkable 
changes of fortune as to constrain the dullest to 
acknowledge Him who setteth up one, and pulleth 
down another. But on the other hand such cases 
are, it may be said, so rare, that they can furnish 
no proper stimulus to exertion. By no means. It 
is not uncommon for men to rise from obscurity to 
fame and fortune, if, denying themselves and ex- 
erting their energies to the utmost, they seize the 
opportunities Providence presents, and our great 
English dramatist desciibes, saying— 


‘s There is a tide in the affairs of men, 
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune!” 


For example, what circumstances apparently 
more desperate some twenty years ago than his 
who now rules France, and holds the destinies of 
Europe in his hands? Then, an exile, a homeless 
wanderer, he was indulging in visions of conquest 
which excited only the pity of women and the 
scorn of sensible men. Yet improbable as once it 
seemed, his dream has come to pass—come true as 
his who, in brethren on their knees at his feet, saw 
the sheaves of a boyish dream bending to his. 
History proves what men, for their encouragement, 
would do well to remember, that there is no trade, 
nor position, however humble, from which, God 
favoring them, some have not climbed the ladder 
at the heels, though not perhaps to the height, of 
Joseph. 

For example, John Bunyan was originally a 
tinker; Faraday, the celebrated chemist, a book- 
binder ; the inventor of the steam-engine, a black- 


92 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


smith; John Foster, whose writings will live with 
our tongue, a weaver; Cook, the distinguished 
navigator, a day laborer; Carey, the first of mis- 
sionaries, a cobbler; Hugh Miller, a mason; while 
Jeremy Taylor, Arkwright, the founder of our 
cotton manufactures, and Tenterden, the great 
Lord Chief-Justice of England, issued from bar- 
bers’ shops. And in less famous spheres our mer- 
chants and men of commerce present equally re- 
markable examples of the success that rewards 
industry and exertion. How many of them have 
entered the towns where they laid the foundation, 
and built up the fabric, of gigantic fortunes, as 
poor as the lonely wanderer who crossed the fords 
of Jordan with only a staff in his hand. 

The foundations of Joseph’s fortune, the steps by 
which he rose from slavery, the pit, and the prison, 
to be the second man in Egypt, were not essen- 
tially different from that wisdom, and self-denial, 
and self-control, and energy of character by which, 
with sound principles and God’s blessing, many 
have commanded, and others may still command, a 
brilliant success. This I willshow. I would mean- 
while remark that the world has seldom seen such 
a rapid and great change of fortune. Not incre- 
dible, the story is yet so improbable, that we might 
have scrupled to receive it on any but Divine 
authority. He would bea bold novelist who would 
venture to weave some of its incidents into the 
pages of a romance. 

In his early loss of a tender mother; in the 
malignant hatred of his brothers; in his sudden 
change from the fond caresses of an indulgent 
father to the blows, and tears, and chains of 





ec 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 93 


slavery ; in the vindictive persecution of his mis- 
tress ; in suffering, though innocent, the penalty of 
guilt; in years of weary and long imprisonment ; 
in the sense of injustice and cruel wrong; in the 
hope deferred that maketh the heart sick; in the 
prospect of wasting his youth, and closing his un- 
happy days, unknown and unpitied, within the bars 
of a prison—no man was more unfortunate. Yet 
in whose history was the hand of Providence more 
visible ! What perils—more formidable than these, 
what temptations, he escaped! His doom is to be 
slain—fate more horrible, to be starved to death, to 
pine away of hunger in the bottom of a darksome 
pit, with no ear to hear his moans, nor hand to 
lend him help; yet he escapes. He is a slave; yet 
what slave so fortunate ?—he is sold to a master 
who appreciates his worth, and bestows on the 
bondsman a confidence which few freemen enjoy. 
He is a prisoner; but the frowns of fortune are 
changed to smiles. He wins the regard of his 
gaoler, and rises into an office of trust. Strange 
man, he is never down but ere long he is up again 
—rising like a life-buoy which, buried under a 
mountain of water, is soon riding triumphant on 
the top of the waves. Twice is he rescued from 
imminent death. Twice he escapes what seems 
hopelessimprisonment. The very cause that threw 
him down becomes a ladder by which he climbs to 
fortune—one dream consigns him to the pit, and 
another raises him to the palace. 

What a revolution in his fate within the brief 
space of a single day! It had made other men 
dizzy. He exchanges a captive’s chain for orna- 
ments of gold; the prison garb for courtly vesture : 


94 STUDINS OF CHARACTER. 


the narrow walls of a gaol for crowded streets 
through which, amid acclaims that rend the skies, 
he is borne in a royal chariot—heralds in advance 
opening the way, and crying, ‘“‘ Bow the knee.” He 
was Potiphar’s slave; he has become Potiphar’s 
lord. He begged favors of a butler; the proudest 
princes of Egypt now live in his smiles and tremble 
at his frown. His word is law; his countenance is 
sunshine ; and if we might make the comparison, 
as God, bestowing all grace through his beloved 
Son, says to sinners and suppliants, ‘‘Go to Jesus,” 
Pharaoh, constituting Joseph the channel and min- 
ister and dispenser of his royal favors, refers all 
affairs to him, saying as we are told he said, “Go 
to Joseph!” And thus in Joseph, once entreating 
cruel brothers for his life, once toiling through the 
desert sands, a lonely, weeping, captive boy, but 
now surrounded with royal state, now married inte 
a princely house, now the Governor of Egypt, now 
the second man in the kingdom, now honored by 
the highest, loved by the humblest, and regarded 
by all, from the monarch on his throne to the pea- 
sant that ploughed his fields under the shadow of 
the pyramids and on the green banks of the Nile, 
as the saviour and benefactor of the land, in this 
successful man we see, perhaps, the most remark- 
able illustration of the words of Solomon, “ Seest 
thou a man diligent in business? he shall stand 
before kings, he shall not stand before mean men.” 

Let us now trace Joseph’s success to its sources. 
They were two. 

1. It was due to God. 

The sun—for a long time acknowledged to be the 
centre around which all the planets roll—is coming 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 95 


to be regarded as also the main source of those 
forces which, under different forms, play their dif- 
ferent parts in the world. To him, for instance, 
the wheel on which some dashing stream flings 
itself, by its impetus and weight turning the grind- 
stones of the mill, or the whirring spindles of the 
factory, owes its power. It was his heat which 
raised the waters of the sea into vapor; floating 
in the realms of air, this vapor was condensed 
into clouds ; and these descended in the rain which, 
gathered by a thousand rills into stream and river, 
sets all the wheels in motion. Not less to the sun 
we owe the wonders achieved by steam,—our rapid 
flight on the iron rails; the victories it wins on the 
deep; the gigantic arms it moves in our service, 
and at our bidding, where fires blaze and tall chim- 
neys smoke. No doubt, the moving force is, in the 
first instance, steam; but the steam is due to the 
fires of the furnace; and the fires of the furnace 
are maintained by the fuel it devours; and the 
fuel, whether wood of forests or coal from the 
bowels of earth, originally derived all its heat from 
the sun—wood and coal being magazines of sun- 
beams. This holds equally true of animal as of 
mechanical forces. The tiger leaps, the eagle soars, 
the elephant treads the forest with imperial foot, 
the fisherman pulls his oar, and the blacksmith 
swings his hammer on the sounding forge; all, 
man and beast, by virtue of a force that descended 
from the skies. The strength, for example, of 
man’s arm lies in its muscles; their strength we 
owe to our food; our food we owe to the earth; 
and its fruits owe their existence and nutritive pro- 
perties to that sun whose heat and light clothe the 


96 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


naked soil with verdant pastures and the fields with 
their golden harvests. 

By following a corresponding process, we would 
be conducted through many an intervening step 
to God himself, as the great final cause of all 
things and events. Universal Lord, Maker and 
Ruler of all, He is in all and over all; so that 
there is a sense in which, not Joseph's fortunes 
only, but all things, are due to Him. The life 
of angels, He is also the life of insects. The 
planets are rolled through space by the same hand 
that shapes every leaf and paints the humblest 
flower: and as “nothing was made without Him 
that is made,” nothing happens without Him that 
does happen—whether it be the fall of a kingdoin 
or of a sparrow. 

The footprints of a man are not more visible on 
the surface of new-fallen snow than are the proofs 
of a Divine power and presence throughout all the 
kingdom of Nature: nor is there need to quote 
Scripture to prove, and adduce crimes to illustrate, 
our depravity, and how the “carnal mind is enmity 
against God,” so long as we have philosophers, so 
called, who refer everything to mere material agen- 
cies ; and excluding all recognition of a Supreme 
Intelligence, recall these words of an Apostle: 
‘“The world by wisdom knew not God.” 

What are the Laws of Nature, for the sake of 
which God is thrust from his imperial throne; dis- 
owned and dishonored by the creatures of his 
hand? Law presupposes a law-maker—a mind to 
foresee the end, and the appointment of means 
adequate to bring it about—to secure its accom- 
plishment. And just as the laws of our country, 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 97 


to borrow a figure from society, are the expressions 
of the will of Parliament, what are the laws of 
nature, properly defined, and traced to their native 
source, but the expression and outgoing of the will 
of God? That will, like ours, works through the 
instrumentality of means; and “‘it is curious,” says 
the Duke of Argyll, in a profound and subtle 
book which he has published, called ‘The Reign 
of Law,’ “‘how the language of the grand seers of 
the Old Testament corresponds with this idea. 
They uniformly ascribe all the operations of nature 
—the greatest and the smallest—to the working of 
Divine power. But they never revolt—as so many 
do in these weaker days—from the idea of this 
power working by wisdom and knowledge in the 
use of means: nor in this point of view do they 
ever separate between the work of creation and 
the work which is going on daily in the existing 
world. Exactly the same language is applied to 
the rarest exertions of power and to the gentlest 
and most constant of all natural operations. Thus 
the saying that ‘the Lord by wisdom hath founded 
the earth ; by understanding hath He established 
the heavens,’ is coupled in the same breath with 
this other saying: ‘ By his knowledge the depths 
are broken up, and the clouds drop down the 
dew.’” The Bible furnishes many other illustra- 
tions of this important remark of our noble author, 
one of which may be quoted for the beauty of its 
poetry, and for its correct and scientific theory of 
rain :—‘‘ Seek Him,” says the prophet Amos, “ that 
maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth 
the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh 
the day dark with night; that calleth the waiters 
7 


93 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


of the sea and poureth them out on the face of the 
earth : the Lord is his name.” 

But, while there is thus a sense in which all 
things may be attributed to God and a sense even 
in which “‘He made the wicked for the day of 
evil,” Joseph’s history furnishes examples of a 
special providence—if not of miraculous, of very 
marvellous as well as manifest interpositions of 
God. ‘Who knoweth,” said Mordecai to Esther, 
when urging that noble woman to risk life and all 
for the sake of her people, ‘‘ who knoweth whether 
thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as 
this?” The special providence which seemed, 
though probable, still problematical to Mordecai 
in Esther’s fortunes, no man can doubt, held the 
helm of Joseph’s. Though somewhat like the 
course of a boat, now riding upon the top of 
the waves and now lost in the trough of the sea, 
or like that of a traveller crossing a inountain 
region, who now stands on sunny heights and 
anon descends into the sombre depths of valleys, 
Joseph’s course, with many ups and downs, goes 
right to its mark—from the point where he starts 
to the goal he reaches. How manifest is it in his 
case, that a Divine eye—none else could—saw the 
end from the beginning? But what a special pro- 
vidence did all the vicissitudes of his chequered 
life—those things men call accidents--like suc- 
cessive waves, bear him on and up to the position 
where he accomplished his singular destiny ; saving 
his family, and through them the hope of the 
Messiah? What hand but one Divine could have 
forged the chain which linked long years together ; 
the sheepfolds of Hebron with the proud palaces of 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 99 


Egypt ; the dreams of the boy with the deeds of the 
man? To take up but its principal links: he 
dreams, and becomes in consequence the object 
of his brothers’ hatred; through their hatred he 
is sold into slavery ; through slavery he enters the 
house of Potiphar ; through events that happen in 
that house, he is consigned to a prison; in the 
prison he meets one of Pharaoh’s servants ; in con- 
sequence of interpreting the servant’s dream he is 
summoned to interpret his master’s ; and ¢#a?, the 
last link of a chain which has its first far away 
in his father’s tent, is fastened to the throne of 
Egypt. 

“Surely,” said the patriarch, ‘God is in this 
place!” As surely God was in that plan. Per- 
haps, in most instances, He only interfered with 
the ordinary laws of nature to the extent of con- 
trolling them with a divine hand—as when He 
restrained Joseph for years from inquiring after 
his father, when a courier mounted on a dromedary 
would have brought him tidings of the old man in 
a very few days. That fact can only be explained 
by a special providence. And without a constant, 
divine superintendence, a superintendence that 
wrought out its ends by many instrumentalities, 
even by dreams, and crimes, and the cruelest, vilest 
passions that rage in human bosoms, how often 
had Joseph’s fortunes been completely wrecked ? 
No hand but God’s could have steered his bark 
through the storms, shoals, reefs, and quicksands 
of his romantic and eventful life ; and well there- 
fore might he acknowledge God in his remarkable 
success, saying to his brothers, ‘‘ As for you, ye 
thought evil against me, but God meant it unto 


100 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, tc save 
much people alive.” 

2. Under God, his success was due to himself. 

There is a passage in Palgrave’s ‘Central 
Arabia,’ on reading which I thought, ‘‘So Pharaoh 
and Joseph may have been seen.” Palgrave tells 
how the street was filled with a great throng of 
people. There isacommotion inthe crowd. Open- 
ing, it shows an armed band advancing. They 
form a circle that has its centre occupied by those 
whose dress, with the respectful distance observed 
by their followers, announce their superior rank. 
It is the monarch. His step is measured, his de- 
meanor grave and somewhat haughty. His robe 
is a Cashmere shawl. He wears a rich turban on 
his head, and at his girdle a gold-mounted sword. 
He moved, a cloud of perfumes ; and as he walked 
along his eye never rested, but flung eager glances, 
rapid and brilliant, on the surrounding crowd. By 
his side walked one also wearing a sword, but 
mounted with silver, not with gold ; and also richly 
dressed, though in somewhat less costly materials. 
This man’s face was more remarkable than his 
attire. It wore a courtly expression, and beamed 
with unusual intelligence. Of these two, the first 
was Telal, the king; the second Zaniel, his trea- 
surer, his prime minister, his sole minister. In this 
man I saw Joseph at the right hand of Pharaoh. 
Their offices were alike. They resembled each 
other in this also, that both had risen to the 
highest from the humblest position in life. Joseph 
had been a slave ; a prisoner; falsely accused and 
cruelly wronged. Zaniel had been an orphaa, a 
ragged boy. His early years were passed in beg- 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 10! 


gary ; nor was it by a mere wave of fortune that 
he was flung into his high position. He had 
climbed to it. He owed it to his admirable dis- 
positions, remarkable talents, unwearied industry, 
skill in business, and extraordinary force of cha- 
racter. In this also the resemblance between the 
two was remarkable. For it was, under God, to 
his high moral and rare mental qualities, and not 
in any degree to chance or fortune, that the young 
Hebrew slave reached power and dignity, becoming 
governor of the kingdom which he had entered as 
a slave. 

Not simply to the wind, however auspicious, does 
the seaman owe his progress. Without it, indeed, 
his ship would but rise and fall in the swell of the 
deep; but without the skill to catch and use 
the breeze, and compel it, even when adverse, by 
dexterous trimming of the yards, and setting of 
the sails, and handling of the helm, to force him 
on and over the waves, what service were the wind 
to him? So was it in Joseph’s, and so it is in all 
cases of success. God gives the opportunities ; but 
success turns on the use we make of them; on the 
promptitude with which we seize the openings of 
providence ; on the weight of character we bring 
into the field: on the resolution and energy we 
throw into our business. 

This is an important practical truth. And to 
illustrate it let me now show how Joseph possessed 
and employed those powers and properties which, 
if Providence, so to speak, affords a man the or- 
dinary chances of life, will win and command 
success. 

First of all, and to begin with that which gives 


102 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the best foundation for prosperity in this world, 
and the only assurance of salvation in the next, 
Joseph was a man of sterling piety and the most 
virtuous principles. Early instructed by a devout 
father, he never forgot the lessons of home and the 
God of his youth. So, those who robbed him of 
his coat did not rob him of his character; nor, 
though reduced to slavery, could his mistress, by 
her frowns or favors, induce him to become the 
slave of sin. The young, when the only thing 
they should fear is guilt, are often afraid to stand 
up for truth and virtue. Pattern to them, he was 
not: neither concealing his regard for God, nor his 
horror of sin. By his piety and virtue he won the 
confidence of his heathen masters. They saw that 
the Lord was with him; and acknowledged the 
blessing of having, though he was but a bondsman, 
a pious servant beneath their roof. 

Again, to the unsullied innocence of virtuous 
youth, Joseph united the wisdom and sagacity of 
age. An exception to the proverb that you cannot 
put an old head on young shoulders, with what 
cool skill and consummate foresight did he choose 
the steps necessary, and most likely, to attain his 
object! Thus by dexterous statesmanship he saved 
Egypt from the horrors of famine; he added to 
the power of the crown without enslaving the 
people ; he carried Pharaoh and the country safely 
through a tremendous crisis. And see how the 
sagacity which characterized his acts as a states- 
man appeared in the steps he took, and took with 
so much success, to awaken the consciences of his 
brethren ; and, bringing them to a sense of their 
sin, lay them true penitents at the feet of that God 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 103 


whose laws they had so grossly violated, and of a 
brother they had so cruelly wronged ? 

Again, many people fail of success in their pro- 
fession and pursuits by neglecting the opportunities 
which Providence presents. They are not prompt 
to seize them and turn them to the most ad- 
vantage. But see how Joseph pushed in, wherever 
he saw an opening. He has Pharaoh’s butler for a 
fellow-prisoner. Something may come out of that. 
In this man, menial as he was, and as to the 
credit of Joseph’s foresight it fell out, he may one 
day, to use a common expression in its literal as 
well as figurative sense, have ‘‘a friend at court.” 
So, though it offered but what is called a chance, 
he does not allow the opportunity to escape. He 
bespeaks the good offices of the butler ; teaching 
us, in our intercourse with mankind, never to make 
an enemy if we can avoid it, and, when it is pos- 
sible, always to make a friend. 

Again, observe how, sure token of his rising one 
day to be the master of others, Joseph had ac- 
quired the mastery over himself. To the aid of 
piety he brought that strength of mind and reso- 
lution of purpose, for lack of which, perhaps, men 
equally pious have yielded to temptations he 
stoutly resisted ; have shamefully fallen where he 
stood ; have lost the battle where he won a splendid 
victory. A grand thing, next to Divine grace the 
grandest thing, to cultivate, is decision of cha- 
racter. To that, in combination with the grace of 
God, Joseph owed it, I believe, that he came un- 
scathed from the fiery furnace into which he was 
thown in the house of Potiphar. On that resolute 
breast of his, temptations broke, like sea waves on 


104 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


a rocky headland. Nor do his strength of purpose 
and the power he had acquired over himself appear 
less remarkable in other passages of his life. It is 
difficult for us with unfaltering tongue to read the 
affecting scenes that passed between him and 
his brothers ere he dropped the mask. What his 
strength of mind, who could go through them 
without a trace of emotion! He is racked with 
anxiety about his aged father ; his bosom swells to 
the bursting at the sight of brothers to whom he 
yearns to disclose himself, that he may lock them 
in fond embraces. Yet he preserves a calm, and if 
not cold, an unimpassioned bearing—like a moun- 
tain whose head is crowned with snows, and whose 
sides are mantled with green forests, and vineyards, 
and groves of olives, while the fires of a volcano 
are raging within its bosom. 

Lastly, there remains one feature of Joseph’s 
character deserving of special notice. Along with 
an iron will, and an energy no task could daunt, 
no labor weary, no burden crush, he had a gentle, 
tender, loving heart. Unselfish, he was ready to 
sympathize with others. One day, for instance, 
when they seemed more than usually depressed, 
how kindly does he ask his fellow prisoners, 
““ Wherefore look ye so sadly to-day ?” Then what 
a tender heart his, who, enduring wrong in Poti- 
phar’s house with the silent heroism of a martyr, 
throws himself in yonder palace into the arms of 
his brethren, and weeps over them like a woman? 
I have no doubt whatever that to the generous, 
kindly, loving disposition which Joseph possessed, 
and all should cultivate, he owed not a little of his 
remarkable success. It won the regards and good- 


JOSEPH THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 105 


will of others—kind affections often doing men 
such service as the arms which a creeping plant 
throws around a pole does it, when, springing from 
the ground, it rises by help of the very object it 
embraces. 

Such was Joseph. Just because he was such, 
God opening up his way and blessing him, he was 
a successful man. 

There was once a sailor, the only survivor of a 
shipwreck, who had a singular fate. Caught in the 
arms of a mountain billow as it went rolling to 
break in spray and snowy foam on an Orcadian 
headland, he was not dashed to pieces, but flung 
right into the mouth of a vast sea-cave, where the 
wave left him ‘‘safe and sound.” His fortune, if 
possible, was stranger still. On recovering from 
the shock, and groping about, he found a barrel of 
provisions the same wave had swept in. With this, 
and water trickling from the roof to quench his 
thirst, he sustained life, till, hearing a human cry 
mingling with the clang of sea-birds,a brave crags- 
man of these isles was swung over the precipice, 
and rescued him from his rocky prison. A wonder- 
ful providence! But it was no such wave of fortune 
that cast Joseph into the high post he filled. 

An example for men to imitate, he owed nothing 
to fortune, but, under God, everything to himself— 
to his piety, his pure and high morality, his extra- 
ordinary self-control, the patience with which he 
bore, the faith with which he waited, the persever- 
ance with which he pursued his objects, an iron will 
and an indomitable energy. These are properties 
which by prayer and pains the young should seek 
to acquire, and the oldest should assiduously 


106 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


cultivate. To these, more than to genius, or to 
great talents, or to any of those things which are 
called good fortune, the greatest of men have 
ascribed their success. I could produce a hundred 
testimonies to that effect, but none better than the 
one with which I now close this paper. Ina letter 
to his son, Sir Fowell Buxton, a great and eminently 
Christian man, says :—“ You are now at that period 
of life in which you must make a turn to the right 
or to the left. You must now give proof of principle, 
determination, and strength of mind ; or you must 
sink into idleness, and acquire the habits and 
character of an ineffective young man. Iam sure 
that a young man may be very much what he 
pleases. In my own case it wasso. Much of my 
happiness and all my prosperity in life have re- 
sulted from the change I made at your age.” Else- 
where he says: ‘‘ The longer I live, the more I am 
certain that the great difference between men, 
between the feeble and the powerful, the great and 
the insignificant, is energy, invincible determina- 
tion—a purpose once fixed, and then death or 
victory |” 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 107 


Hoses the Patriot. 


TAKE him for all in all, regard him not in one 
but many aspects, Moses is the greatest character 
in history, sacred or profane. 

As a writer, for example, he takes precedence of 
the most venerable authors of antiquity. Con- 
secrating, so to speak, the press, the first book 
types ever printed was a copy of the Holy Scrip- 
tures ; and in beautiful harmony with that remark- 
able providence, it is more than probable that the 
first book pen ever wrote was one of the five 
of which Moses was the author. Certain it is that 
if his were not the first ever written—written long 
ages before Herodotus composed his history, or 
Homer sang his poems—his are the oldest books 
extant. Before all others in point of time, what 
author occupies himself with themes of such sur- 
passing grandeur? Like one who had met God 
face to face within the cloudy curtains of the awful 
mount, he introduces us into the counsels of the 
Almighty ; and records events which, receding 
into a past, and stretching forward into a future 
eternity, had God for their author, the world for 
their theatre, and for their end the everlasting 
destinies of mankind. Apart from the surpassing 
grandeur of his subjects, even in the very manner 
of handling them, the world’s oldest is its foremost 


, 


103 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


writer. What other poet rises to heights or sus- 
tains a flight so lofty as Moses—in his dying song, 
for instance, his parting words to the tribes of 
Israel, ere he ascended Nebo to wave them his last 
farewell, and vanish forever from their wondering, 
weeping gaze? The inimitable pathos of his style 
as illustrated in the story of Joseph, the tears and 
trembling voices of readers in all ages have ac- 
knowledged. In simple, tender, touching narra- 
tive no passages in any other book will compare 
with it; and yet so wide and varied is his range 
that the writings of Moses contain, infidels them- 
selves being judges, the sublimest expressions man 
has spoken or penned. By universal consent, for 
example, no other book, ancient or modern, the 
production of the highest mind and of the most 
refined and cultivated age, contains a sentence so 
sublime as this: ‘‘And God said, Let there be 
light : and there was light.” 

Again, as a divine, compared to his knowledge 
of the attributes and character of God, how gross 
the notions of the heathen ; how puerile, dim, and 
distorted the speculations of their greatest sages ! 
The wisest of them look like men with unsteady 
steps and outstretched arms, groping for truth in 
the dark. As to the mass of the people, they im- 
puted crimes and vices to their gods which would 
now-a-days consign men to the gallows, or banish 
them from decent society. But how pure, and 
comprehensive also, Moses’ estimate of the Divine 
character—of what we are to believe concerning 
God, and what duty God requires of men! Since 
his day—removed from our own by almost four 
thousand years—science has made _ prodigious 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 109 


strides; but those who have discovered new 
elements, new forces, new worlds, new stars, new 
suns, have brought to light no new attribute of 
God, nor a single feature of his character with 
which Moses was not acquainted. During these 
long ages philosophers and divines have been 
studying morals, the duties men owe to God and 
to each other, the laws that bind society and hold 
its parts together; but they who have added a 
thousand truths to science and a thousand inven- 
tions to art, have not discovered any duties which 
Moses overlooked, or added so much as one law to 
his code of morals. Yet he had no Bible, as we 
have, whereby to acquaint himself with God: nor 
was he reared, like us, in a Christian land, but 
among those’who, with all their boasted learning, 
worshipped the ox, and serpent, beasts of the field, 
fowls of the air, and creeping things—divinities so 
innumerable, that it was said there were more gods 
than men in Egypt. Let the character of his age, 
and the circumstances in which he lived, be taken 
into account, and he is the greatest of divines ; nor 
does his sublime knowledge of God, of the mysteries 
of religion, and of the moralities of life, admit of any 
but one explanation. The glory of his writings 
and of his face are to be traced to the same source. 
He was admitted into the secret counsels of the 
Eternal ; and spake, like other holy men of old. as 
he was moved by the Holy Ghost. 

Again, as a leader and legislator Moses occupies 
a place no other man has approached, far less 
attained to. History records no such achievements 
as his who, without help from man, struck the 
fetters off a million and more of slaves; placing 


Ito STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


himself at their head, led them forth from the land 
of bondage ; reducing them to order, controlled 
more turbulent and subdued more stubborn ele- 
ments than any before or since have had to deal 
with; formed a great nation out of such base 
materials ; and, casting into the shade the cele- 
brated retreat of the ten thousand Greeks, con- 
ducted to a successful issue the longest and hardest 
march on record—a march continued for forty 
years in the face of formidable enemies, through 
howling wildernesses and desert sands. Then look 
at the sacred and secular polity which he established 
in Israel! That constitution which makes our 
country the envy of the world has been, like an 
oak, the slow growth of ages ; and it was often only 
after long and sometimes bloody struggles that 
right here prevailed over might, and laws were 
established that render equal justice to all classes 
of the community. But, event unparalleled in any 
other age or country, Moses established in Israel a 
form of government and a code of laws which 
neither time nor experience has been able to 
improve. Like the goddess fabled to have sprung, 
full grown and full armed, from the head of Jupiter, 
or like those who never hung on mother’s breast, 
the man and woman whom Eden received to its 
blissful bowers, it was mature and perfect from the 


' . beginning. What a man was he who, in that rude 


and early age, inculcated laws that have formed, 
through all succeeding ages, the highest standard 
of morality! Since his long-distant day men have 
run to and fro and knowledge has been increased ; 
the boundaries of science have been vastly extended, 
but not those of morality ; nor has one new duty 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. Ilr 


been added to those of the two tables he brought 
down from Sinai. A perfect code of morals, 
adapted to all ages, circumstances, and countries, 
time has neither altered nor added to the Ten 
Commandments. 

The ten stones of the arch on which our domestic 
happiness, the purity of society, the security of life 
and property, and the prosperity of nations stand, 
it was these commandments the Son of God came 
from heaven, our substitute, to obey; with his 
blood, not to abrogate, but to enforce them ; on his 
cross to exalt, not in his tomb to bury them ; and, 
cementing the shattered arch with his precious 
blood, to lend to laws that had the highest authority 
of Sinai, the no less solemn and more affecting 
sanctions of Calvary. 

As a legislator, besides moral, Moses established 
criminal and civil laws, which, unless in so far as 
they were specially adapted to the circumstances 
of the Israelites, our senators and magistrates 
would do well to copy. Inspired with the pro- 
foundest wisdom, they are patterns to all ages of 
equity and justice. For instance, how much kinder 
to the poor, and less burdensome to the community, 
than ours, are what may be called the “ poor laws” 
of Moses! How much more wise than ours those 
that dealt with theft,—thus far that, requiring the 
thief to restore fourfold the value of what he had 
stolen, and work till he had done so, they assigned 
to that crime a punishment which at once secured 
reparation to the plundered and the reformation of 
the plunderer. Nor less wise, I may add, those 
sanitary laws of which, though long neglected, late 
years and bitter experience have been teaching us 


112 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the importance. It is only now, with all our 
boasted progress in arts and science, that we are 
awaking to the value of such regulations as, secur- 
ing cleanliness in the habits and in the homes of 
the people, promote their health and preserve their 
lives. Anticipating the discoveries of the nineteenth 
century and the plans of our modern sanitary 
reformers, Moses was four thousand years ahead of 
his age. Judged, therefore, either by the civil or 
criminal code he enjoined, or by those Ten Com- 
mandments which lie at the foundation of all 
human justice, and shall continue the supreme 
standard of morals so long as time endures, 
Moses claims precedence over all the sovereigns, 
and senators, and legislators the world has seen. 
As a philosopher, notwithstanding the audacious 
attacks now making on his narrative of the Creation, 
I venture to say that Moses, as he was first in the 
point of time, is the first in point of rank. He fills 
in the temple of science that high-priestly office his 
brother held in the temple of religion. How 
sublime, for example, his account of Creation com- 
pared with the monstrous fables and puerile con- 
ceits current among pagan nations! I know, 
indeed, no greater contrast than that between the 
childish, monstrous, and often immodest mytho- 
logies of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and 
those opening pages of the Book of Genesis, where 
God appears on the scene—calling creation into 
being by his simple but almighty word ; establishing 
order amid unimaginable confusion; evoking light 
out of primeval darkness ; assigning their different 
offices to the elements of earth and the shining orbs 
of heaven; building up the grand pyramid of 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. : 113 


Nature, and on its lofty apex placing man, made ir 
his own image, and enthroned lord of all. Believe 
some, and this is all a fancy, a mere fable. Foiled 
at every point, and on every occasion, where they 
employed history, and mental or moral science to 
attack the Christian faith, compelled also to acknow- 
ledge that the most formidable sceptics of other 
days, Hobbes and Voltaire, David Hume and Tom 
Paine,—without followers now save among the 
dregs of society,—were ignominiously defeated, the 
infidels of our day have changed their plan of 
attack. Obliged to seek new weapons, they are 
now attempting to overthrow the authority of 
Moses by the authority of physical science; and 
ever as some old bone, some fragment of ancient 
pottery, some stone ax or arrowhead turns up 
which they fancy will serve their purpose, there is 
great shouting in the camp of the Philistines, and 
fear seizes some that “‘the ark of God is taken.” 
A bone in Samson’s hand, the jawbone even of an 
ass, once did great execution ; as did also the piece 
of pottery which a woman from the beleaguered wall 
pitched on the head of Abimelech, smiting him to 
the ground. But the enemies of our faith, though 
using similar weapons, have not achieved equal 
success. Looking at the future in the light of the 
past, we can only wonder at the timidity of those 
who fear these assaults, and at the credulity of 
such as, however fond of novelties, allow such 
crude and silly arguments to seduce them from the 
faith. 

For example, a few years since a human jawbone 
was paraded before the world. It was said to have 
been dug out of a gravel-bed in France of so great 

8 


114 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


antiquity that the person to whom it belonged 
must have existed many thousand years antecedent 
to the period at which Moses places the first 
appearance of man on the earth. Well, this bone, 
whose vast age was to demolish the authority of the 
Bible, being sawn asunder, was examined: and 
with what result? Its internal condition demon- 
strated that, instead of being older than the age of 
Adam, it was but a few, even if a few, years older 
than those who were more the dupes of their own 
hatred to religion, than of the workmen that 
had stolen this fragment of mortality from a 
churchyard, and palmed it off on these credulous 
sceptics. 

There is another and similar fact, much too in 
structive to be left in the oblivion to which morti- 
fied and defeated infidels would fain consign it. 
Years ago, a brick was found on the banks of the 
Nile, but many feet beneath their surface. These 
banks are formed of the slimy and fertile mud 
which each annual overflow deposits in the green 
valley of that famous river; and assuming—for 
all the theories opposed to Christianity are full 
of assumptions as the basis of their calculations— 
that these deposits have been of the same thickness, 
one year with another, from the most remote an- 
tiquity, such was the depth at which this brick was 
found, that it must have been made many thousand 
years before the time at which Moses fixes the 
creation of man. So infidels alleged and argued. 
How they told this in Gath, and published it in the 
streets of Ashkelon! With this brick they had 
inflicted a blow on the head of Moses, from which 
he could not possibly recover—with him not 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 115 


“Babylon the Great,” but the faith of Christendon. 
had fallen. Well, the defenders of the faith were 
puzzled, and not a little perplexed. It was not 
easy to prove that the deposits of the Nile were 
irregular, and that the foundations, therefore, on 
which the attack rested were unsound. But, teach- 
ing us not to allow our confidence in the faith to be 
easily shaken by things which are at first, and even 
may continue, inexplicable, the problem was at 
length solved. The difficulty was finally and 
authoritatively removed. This famous brick fell 
into the hands of one familiar with the works of 
antiquity, and above all others expert in determining 
theirage. He examined it ; and proved to demon- 
stration that, however it got buried in the valley of 
the Nile, or whatever be the rate of increase in the 
river’s alluvial deposits, that brick did not carry us 
back to ages antecedent to Mosaic history. It was 
of Roman manufacture, and belonged to an age no 
older than the Cesars. 

Christianity does not teach science, nor profess 
to teach it. It was for another and higher purpose 
that its pages were inspired. To serve its own 
proper and important end, it adapted its language 
to the times and the understandings of those it 
addressed. And though, in consequence of this, 
there were statements in the Bible which could 
not be reconciled with the modern discoveries of 
science, these should not have the weight of a 
feather against the historical, the external and 
internal, the miraculous and prophetical evidences 
on which its divinity stands, and has stood un- 
shaken the assaults of two thousand years. 

But, in truth, the greater the progress of science, 


116 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the more manifest is the harmony between its 
revelations and those of the Word of God. 

For instance, Moses represents the earth as 
having been, antecedent to the present epoch, 
without form and void—an expression denoting a 
state of extreme and violent confusion, of death, 
and drear desolation. And how is his statement, 
not confuted, but corroborated by the remarkable 
discoveries of the nineteenth century? The very 
same story is written on the rocks, which we read 
in the book of Genesis. The solid strata above 
which we walk, build our houses, and reap our 
harvests, have been explored by the lights of 
science; and in their strange contortions, irregu- 
larities, and confusion, and those remains of in- 
numerable and extinct creatures, that retaining the 
postures of a violent and sudden death, have been 
entombed within their stony sepulchres, they pre- 
sent a most remarkable commentary on Holy 
Writ. 

Again in the last days, according to St. Peter, 
there were scoffers to arise, asserting “that all 
things remain as they were from the beginning 
of the creation.” So said David Hume; and so 
still say those who, in opposition to Moses and 
to the miracles of Scripture, take their stand on 
the uniform successions and invariable operations 
of the laws of Nature. But here the philosopher's 
geology and our theology are at one. The most 
novel discoveries of our age are in harmony with 
the oldest statements of revelation. They prove 
that there have been no such invariable operations 
as would exclude the possibility or probability of 
miracles.. They demonstrate what Moses asserts, 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 117 


that all things have not remained as they were 
from the beginning. They show causes even now 
at work sufficient in the course of time to bring 
about the grand catastrophe that, with a God in 
judgment and a world in flames, shall usher ina 
new era—‘the new heavens, and the new earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness.” 

Again, the Bible teaches us that the world is 
“‘reserved unto fire,” and what it long ages ago 
revealed, is the conclusion to which the discoveries 
of science are now tending. In proof of that, see 
what one of our greatest modern philosophers, 
who has certainly never stood forth as a defender 
of the faith, says. He maintains that through 
the agency of volcanoes and other active causes, 
“the foundations of our earth shall be so weakened, 
that its crust, shaken and rent by reiterated con- 
vulsions, must in the course of time fall in.” 
““When we consider,” says Sir Charles Lyell, “the 
combustible nature of the elements of the earth: 
the facility with which their compounds may be 
decomposed and enter into new combinations: 
the quantity of heat which they evolve during 
these processes: when we recollect the expansive 
power of steam, and that water itself is composed 
of two gases which, by their union, produce intense 
heat ; when we call to mind the number of explo- 
sive and detonating compounds, which have been 
already discovered ; we may be allowed to share 
the astonishment of Pliny, that a single day should 
pass without a general conflagration : Excedit pro- 
fecto, omnia miracula, ullum diem fuisse, quo non 
cancta conflagrarent.” 

Again, and to take one other example from 


118 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Moses’ account of the Creation, he represents light 
as having been formed before the sun was hung 
in heaven to rule the day, or the moon to rule 
the night. According to him, ere day or night 
was, God sent forth the fiat, ‘“ Let there be light, 
and there was light.” And taking their stand on 
an apparent impossibility, infidels have challenged 
the soundness of his philosophy ; asking in tones 
of undisguised triumph, How could there be light 
before, and without, the sun? Well, this was a 
difficulty. Satisfied on other and impregnable 
grounds of the truth of the sacred narrative, 
Christians felt confident that the objection ad- 
mitted of an answer; but till science came to the 
rescue, such answers as they attempted were more 
ingenious than satisfactory. The difficulty, how- 
ever, has vanished; and Moses’ account, no longer 
a subject for cavilling, is found to be in perfect 
harmony with the discoveries and the doctrines 
of modern science. Inspired of God, he antici- 
pated our tardy discoveries. Relating that light 
was created before the sun appeared, he represents 
it as an element existing independently of that 
luminary. And so it does. This is now all but 
universally admitted—light being regarded as the 
effect of the undulations of an ether which, in- 
finitely subtle and elastic, pervades all space, and 
finds but exciting causes in electricity and com- 
bustion, the sun and stars. 

In taking leave of Moses as a philosopher, I 
have one more remark to make—one inexplicable, 
unless he were inspired. It was thousands of 
years before the telescope was invented and Galileo 
had turned it on the starry heavens, before Newton 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 119g 


had discovered the laws of gravitation, before 
anatomists. had studied the structure of a fossil 
bone, before geologists had explored the bowels 
and strata of our earth; it was long ages, in fact, 
before true science was born, that Moses lifted the 
veil from the mysteries of Creation—stating facts 
in regard to its order, and laws, and phenomena, 
that are in perfect harmony with the greatest dis- 
coveries of our day. Surely, as he was the first, 
he is the greatest of philosophers; as well the 
greatest Philosopher as the greatest Writer, Divine, 
Leader, and Lawgiver, the world has seen. 

c“ Let us now regard him as a patriot. There are 
those who do not believe in patriotism; treating 
it as some of our popular novelists, whose works 
are appropriately called ‘“‘ works of fiction,” do 
religion. Unable to understand religion, they can 
only caricature it. Whenever any of their cha- 
racters, man or woman, is introduced as using the 
language of piety, or as belonging to what, bor- 
rowing an expression from the ribald words of 
Robert Burns, they call the waco gude, that person 
they invariably represent as either a fool or a 
hypocrite, weak or wicked. If their defence is, 
that they, painting from life, have described re- 
ligious people as they found them, we might reply 
they had been very unfortunate in their company ; 
and that, as was likely to happen with men of 
their type, they must have been much more familiar 
with the dross than the gold of religious society. 
But their bad opinion of such as make a marked 
profession of piety may be otherwise accounted 
for. ‘‘Thou thoughtest,” says God to the wicked, 
“that I was altogether such an one as thyself ;” 


120 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


and feeling, with minds at enmity with God and 
averse from the practice of holiness and virtue, 
that they themselves should be hypocrites were 
they to assume a strict profession, they judge 
others by themselves. Nor are they singular in 
the use of so false a standard. Profligates and 
- libertines do not believe in the existence of virtue 
—regarding it in others as a mere pretence, no- 
thing else than the paint which hides the blotches 
on the face of vice. Neither do thieves, 1 may 
observe, believe in honesty. Nor do selfish men 
believe in generosity. Many politicians, the heads 
or tools of parties, though not steeped in such cor- 
ruption as that minister of the last century who 
boasted that he knew the price of every member 
of the House of Commons, have only sought their 
own aggrandisement, when they talked loudest of 
their country, its liberties, its honor, and its 
interests. And no wonder that men without a 
spark of patriotism in their own breasts should 
doubt its existence in others ! 
Presenting a noble contrast to the proverb long 
common in Italy, Dolce far niente—‘It is sweet to 
indulge in idleness,” the old Roman sang, Dulce et 
decorum pro patria mori— It is sweet and graceful 
to die for one’s country ;” and one of these old 
Romans is said, when it was only by such a sacri- 
fice that Rome could be spared, to have rode out 
of its gates full armed in sight of weeping thou- 
sands, and taking brave farewell of brothers, friends, 
and countrymen, to have spurred his steed into the 
gulf that closed its monstrous jaws on horse and 
rider. The lofty patriotism of the poet may be 
only the sentimentalism of song, and the hero of 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 12! 


the gulf only such a fable as adorns traditivunary 
lore. But Moses was a patriot of that type. 

How we extolled the conduct of the Americans 
in China, when, though not bound to mingle in the 
bloody fray, they felt it impossible to look on 
mere spectators, where our flag was flying, and our 
guns were flashing, and our men were falling amid 
the smoke of battle? Hoisting their anchors, and 
spreading sail, they took their places beside us, 
saying, “‘ Blood is thicker than water!” It was in 
such another act that Moses’ patriotism first burst 
out into flame. Neither his rank as the adopted 
son of Pharaoh’s daughter and probable successor 
to her father’s throne, nor his education as a prince 
of Egypt, nor the pride, and pomp, and pleasures 
of a palace had made him ashamed of his race, 
so indifferent to their cruel sufferings. His brave 
mother, in her assumed character of a nurse, had 
probably told her boy the story of his people, and 
of their wrongs ; swearing him to fidelity, and sow- 
ing in his young heart the seeds of that piety and 
patriotism which afterwards determined his choice. 
Though apparently dormant for forty years, as has 
happened in cases of conversion, the seed a mother’s 
hand sowed at length sprang up. He began to 
feel and take a deep interest in his people. Their 
sufferings haunted his pillow by night, and engaged 
his anxious thoughts by day. The fire, so to 
speak, was laid; and it needed but a spark, the 
touch of a match, to kindle it—a purpose served 
by a sight he one day happened to see. Conceal- 
ing his object, he had gone “out to his brethren 
to look on their burdens,” when it chanced that an 
Egyptian was smiting a Hebrew. He looked. He 


122 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


felt every blow that fell on the poor, crouching 
slave. The fated hour had come. Plucking off 
the mask which had for a while concealed his 
secret, he flung himself into the fray; and, be- 
striding his prostrate compatriot, with flashing eye 
faced the Egyptian, and smote him dead. Life he 
risks ; safety, riches, honors, rank, and perhaps 
a crown he casts away—all to right the wrongs of 
a bleeding wretch, in whom his piety recognized a 
child of God, and his patriotism a countryman and 
a brother. In-the words of St. Paul, “By faith 
Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be 
called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing 
rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, 
than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; 
esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches 
than the treasures in Egypt.” 

This, if it could not be called his early, was now 
his only choice. Unlike many who, yielding to 
the generous impulses of youth, espouse the cause 
of the wronged, and fight their first battles under 
the flag of liberty, but in maturer years, or old age, 
live to desert it, Moses, henceforth, never swerved 
from the good part he had chosen. He pursued 
it onward to his grave with a pure, unselfish patri- 
otism no time could weaken, nor injustice and 
ingratitude cool. If ever man was tempted to 
abandon a cause which he had undertaken, it 
was he. Why should he have entered on it, and 
left his happy household, and the quiet hills of 
Midian, to cast himself into a sea of troubles? 
Other actors have been hissed from the stage where 
they were once applauded ; other benefactors have 
had to complain of public ingratitude ; and under 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 123 


the impulse of a temporary madness, other nations 
have brought their truest patriots to the scaffold. 
But for forty long years what reward, else than 
abuse, murmurs, opposition, unjust suspicion, and re- 
peated attempts on his life, did Moses receive from 
those for whom he had rejected the most splendid 
offers, on whose behalf he had made the costliest 
sacrifices? If patriotism is to be measured not 
only by the wrongs it bears, but by the sacrifices 
it makes, he stands far ahead of all whose deeds 
grateful nations have commemorated in monu- 
mental marble, or poets have enshrined in song. 
Take for example the unselfish, for its gene- 
rosity and self-denial the matchless, part he acted 
at Sinai, when the idolatry of Israel had awoke all 
the terrors of the Mount, and God himself, pro- 
voked beyond all patience, was about to descend— 
to sweep man, woman, and child from the face of 
the earth. ‘‘Let me alone,” said Jehovah, ad- 
dressing Moses, who, forgetting the wrongs he had 
suffered at their hands, had thrown himself between 
“the people and an angry God, ‘“‘Let me alone, 
that my wrath may wax hot against them, and 
that I may consume them”—nor was that all: 
“ And I,” he added, “will make of thee a great 
nation.” A splendid offer! Yet one which, not 
on this only, but also on another occasion, Moses 
declined ; turning twice from a crown to fall on his 
knees, and pour out his whole soul to God in ear- 
nest prayers for the guilty people. He did more— 
far more. Deeply as he abhorred their conduct 
towards Jehovah; keenly as he felt their ingrati- 
tude to himself, he returned from their camp to tell 
God that he could not, and did not wish to, outlive 


124 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


them. ‘Oh, this people,” he cried, “ have sinned a 
great sin, and have made their gods of gold; yet 
now, if thou wilt forgive their sin!” But what if 
God will not ?—then with such patriotism as, with 
the exception of Paul’s, never burnt in human 
bosom, or burst from human lips, he exclaimed: 
“If not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book!” I 
will sink or swim with my people! If they are to 
perish, let me not live to see it. 

It is no disparagement to Moses’ patriotism that 
we are told that he ‘‘had respect unto the recom- 
pense of the reward.” For what is that but in 
other words to say, that he walked by faith and not 
by sight: and, sacrificing a present for a much 
greater, though future, benefit, trode the path by 
which all goodness and greatness are attained. 
The ardent student who, stealing hours from sleep, 
bends his pallid face and lofty brow over the mid- 
night lamp, and spends the time others give to 
youthful follies in holding converse with the mighty 
dead, is in the honors and laurels that crown such 
toils looking for a recompense of reward. The 
soldier who leaves home for a foreign shore to hold 
his weary watch, while brothers and sisters are 
locked in the sweet arms of slumber; who, while 
plenty loads their table, endures hunger and thirst, 
and cold and nakedness; who carries his colors 
into the smoke of battle, or plants them on the - 
summit of the deadly breach, is also, in the fame 
or fortune that reward such heroism, looking for 
a recompense of reward. Thus likewise do thou- 
sands who, to enjoy ease and a competency in the 
evening of their days, practise a rigid economy, 
denying themselves pleasures in which many others 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 125 


4 Sulac. Man, unlike the lower animals whose 
eyes ai naturally bent on the ground, with his 
noble anj upright form, is made to look upwards 
and forwaids; and there the student, the soldier, 
the prudeat man of business, looking beyond the 
pres:nt hour, apply to worldly matters the very 
principle that in the region of spiritual things raises 
a child of God above the world, and leads him to 
look beyond it. To what but to their allowing the 
present to dominate over the future, is the ruin of 
sinners in almost every instance to be traced ? 
They sacrifice, to the gratification of a moment or 
an hour, their peace, their conscience, their purity, 
their souls, with a folly far beyond his who, selling 
his birthright for a mess of pottage, said: ‘“‘ Behold! 
I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this 
birthright be to me?” Would to God men some- 
what changed Esau’s question, and put it thus :— 
“When I am at the point to die, what profit shall 
this pleasure yieldto me? It looks charming now, 
how will it look then? It is pleasant to anticipate ; 
how will it bear reflection-—another day, on another 
bed, in the hour of death, at the bar of judgment ?” 
The pity is that men will not have regard to 
“the recompense of the reward,” and allow them- 
selves to be influenced—for both man and God act 
from motives—by high and holy motives. Our 
Lord himself, for the joy set before Him, endured 
the cross, despising the shame. Nor does it detract 
from Moses’ piety and patriotism that, instead of 
acting from blind and ordinary impulses, he had 
regard to the “recompense of the reward.” 
Nothing could be further removed from selfish- 
ness than the ends he aimed at, and the reward he 


126 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


looked for. His was not the spirit of such as are 
deterred from gross sins only by the fear of hell ; 
who discover nothing in heaven to desire but the 
refuge it offers, nor in Jesus to love but the crown 
He bestows. Devoutest of men, he aimed at the 
glory of God ; purest of patriots, he forgot his own 
interests in those of his people. These, the divine 
glory and the good of Israel, were his aims, and 
their attainment his sufficient reward—his motives 
as unselfish as the man’s who leaps into the boiling 
flood to save a drowning child ; and whose reward 
is, not the plaudits of the crowd that watch him 
from the banks, as, buffeting the torrent with one 
hand, and holding up the dripping infant in the 
other, he regains the shore, but the satisfaction of 
having saved the perishing, and of seeing the 
mother, whose thanks he waits not to receive, 
clasping her living boy to her beating breast. 

But a right estimate of Moses’ patriotism cannot 
be formed unless we take into account the circum- 
stances in which he was reared. These were not 
less unfavorable to this virtue than are the gloom 
and foul vapors of a charnel-house to the growth 
and fragrance of a flower. It is not from castles so 
much as cabins, from princes so much as from 
among the people, that reformers and patriots 
spring. Luther came out of a miner’s hut; and 
while the German boy sang in the streets for his 
bread, John Knox earned his by teaching. Wallace 
and William Tell, Hampden and George Wash- 
ington embarked in the cause of freedom with 
little else but their lives to lose. The noblest 
sacrifices of piety and patriotism have been made 
by such as have not a drop of noble blood in their 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 127 


veins. Few histories are more illustrative of that 
fact than Scotland’s. Many of her nobles signed 
the Solemn League and Covenant, but with a 
very few, though illustrious, exceptions, it was her 
middle-classes and peasantry who suffered for it. 
It was their blood that dyed her scaffolds, and 
their strong arms that kept the banners flying on 
her moors and mountains ; and it was they who, 
hoping against hope, never sheathed their swords 
till the tyrant fled, and those liberties, civil and 
sacred, were secured which have made our country 
the boast of Britons and envy of the world. 

It is not commonly—and this makes Moses’ 
case the more remarkable—from among the ener- 
vating influences of wealth, and ease, and luxury, 
that men come forth to do grand things. It is 
with them as with birds. Those birds soar the 
highest that have had the hardest upbringing. 
Warm and soft the pretty nest where, under the 
covering of her wings, amid green leaves and 
golden tassels and the perfume of flowers, the 
mother-bird of sweet voice, but short and feeble 
flight, rears her tender brood. Not thus are eagles 
reared, as I have seen on scaling a dizzy crag. 
There, their cradle an open shelf, their nest a few 
rough sticks spread on the naked rock, the bright- 
eyed eaglets sat exposed to the rains that seamed 
the hill-sides, and every blast that howled through 
the glen. Such the hard nursing of birds that were 
thereafter to soar in sunny skies, or with strong 
wings cleave the clouds and ride upon the storm ! 
Even so, I thought, God usually nurses those amid 
difficulties and hardships who are destined to rise 
to eminence, and accomplish great deeds on earth. 


128 STUDIES OF CHARACTFR, 


Hence says Solomon, ‘“‘It is good for man te bear 
the yoke in his youth.” 

Hence, because he had had no such yoke to 
bear, the more honor to Moses, the more illus- 
trious his patriotism. Bred ina palace, he espoused 
the cause of the people: nursed on the lap of 
luxury, he embraced adversity : reared in a school 
of despots, he became the brave champion of 
liberty: long associated with oppressors, he took 
the side of the oppressed: educated as her son, 
he forfeited the favor of a princess to maintain 
the rights of the poor: with a crown in prospect, 
he had the magnanimity to choose a cross; and 
for the sake of his God and Israel, abandoned 
ease, refinement, luxuries, and the highest earthly 
honors, to be a houseless wanderer; “‘ esteeming 
the reproach of Christ greater riches than the trea- 
sures of Egypt,” and ‘choosing rather to suffer 
affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the 
pleasures of sin for a season.” 

That decision was as pious as patriotic ; and in 
Moses’ piety, let it be observed, we have that 
which was the true support and backbone of his 
patriotism. Nor in that did his case present, 
though an illustrious, a singular conjunction. Re- 
ligious men haye ever proved the truest patriots. 
The cause of freedom has owed more to them 
thar to any other class. They have ever fought 
best and bravest in their country’s battles who 
sought another one ; and strong in faith, at peace 
with God, and sustained by the hopes of immortality, 
were careless whether, as one of our martyrs ex- 
pressed it, they rotted in the earth or in the air; 
died amid holy prayers, or the shouts of battie 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 129 


and the roar of cannon. The greatest patriots of 
our own country were not its worldlings, its pro- 
fligates, its sceptics; but devout and holy men— 
men who slept with their Bibles as well as pistols 
by their pillow ; who carried the sacred volume to 
battle in their bosoms as well as in their hearts ; 
and whose tombstones, venerated by a pious pea- 
santry, still stand on our moors and mountains, 
marked by the appropriate symbols of an open 
Bible and a naked sword. But never was the con- 
nection between true piety and true patriotism so 
eminently illustrated as in the case of Moses. He 
abandoned all worldly interests for those of religion 
and of his race. He preferred the reproach of 
Christ to the riches of Egypt. Though thereby 
claiming kindred with a race of slaves, he counted 
it a higher honor to be a child of Abraham than 
reckoned the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He gal- 
lantly embarked in the cause of his brethren, re- 
solved to sink or swim with them. Type of our 
divine Redeemer, he bore much for them, and bore 
also much from them. Offering the highest pattern 
of patriotism sustained by piety, with what meek- 
ness he met their insolence ; with what patience 
their provocations; with what forgiveness their 
unparalleled ingratitude and oft-repeated attempts 
upon his life !—and when God, provoked to cast 
them off, offered to make of him a great nation, 
with what noble generosity did he intercede on 
their behalf, refusing to build his own house on the 
ruins of theirs ! 

From him we may learn how to be patriots; 
and how patriotism, like all other virtues, has its 
true root in piety. He did not miss the recom 

9 


130 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


pense of reward. He enjoys its heaven. He had 
it on earth—accomplishing the grand object of his 
life, when, with victory and thanksgiving on his 
lips, his last gaze, ere he ascended to the heavenly 
Canaan, was fixed in dying raptures on the pro- 
mised land ; and though no nation with the tears 
of bitter grief and the pomp of public funeral 
followed their great leader to his grave, he was 
buried with higher honors—as some poet thus 
finely sings : 


By Nebo’s lonely mountain, 
On this side Jordan’s wave, 
In a vale in the land of Moab, 
There lies a lonely grave. 
And no man dug the sepulchre, 
And no man gave it air, 
For the angels of God upturned the sod, 
And laid the dead man there. 


That was the grandest funeral 
That ever passed on earth, 
But no man heard the tramping 
Or saw the train go forth. 
For without sound of music, 
Or voice of them that wept, 
Silently down from the mountain’s crown 
The great procession went. 


Perchance the bald old eagle, 
On gray Bethpeor’s height, 
Out of his rocky eyerie, 
Looked on the wondrous sight. 
Perchance the lion stalking 
Stills shuns that hallowed spot, 
For beast and bird have seen and heard 
That which man knoweth not. 


But when the warrior dieth, 
His comrades in the war, 

With arms reversed and muffled drum, 
Follow the funeral car. 


MOSES THE PATRIOT. 


They show the banners taken, 
They tell his battles won : 

And after him lead his masterless steed, 
While peals the minute-gun. 


Amid the noblest of the land 
Men lay the sage to rest, 

And give the bard an honored place, 
With costly marbles drest. 

In the great Minster transept 
Where lights like glories fall, 

And the choir sings, and the organ rings 
Along the emblazoned wall. 


This was the bravest warrior 
That ever buckled sword, 
This the most gifted poet 
That ever breathed a word. 
And never earth’s philosopher 
Traced with his golden pen, 
On the deathless page, truths half so sage 
As he wrote down for men. 


And had he not high honors— 
The hill-side for his pall, 

To lie in state while angels wait 
With stars for tapers tall ; 

And the dark rock pines with tossing plumes 
Over his bier to wave, 

And God’s own hand in that mountain land 
To lay him in the grave? 


In that deep grave without a name, 
Whence his uncoffined clay 

Shall break again—most wondrous thought— 
Before the Judgment-day ; 

And stand with glory wrapped around 
On the hills he never trode, 

And speak of the strife that won our life 
With the incarnate Son of God. 


132 


STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Oh, lonely tomb in Moab’s land! 
Oh, dark Bethpeor's hill ! 

Speak to these anxious hearts of ours 
And teach them to be still. 

God hath his mysteries of grace, 
Ways that we cannot tell ; 

He hides them deep like the secret sleep 
Of him He loved so well. 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 133 


Joshua the Colonist. 


WHETHER descending from the snowy Alps, 
where flowers bloom on its margin, to melt away 
before the summer heat, and pour from its icy 
tavern a turbid, roaring torrent, or descending 
through the drear desolation of Arctic regions 
to topple over the sea-cliff, and form the icebergs, 
the dread of mariners, that come floating like 
glittering castles and cathedrals, into southern 
seas, the glacier is a river of ice—not of fluid 
but of solid water. Tossed into waves of many a 
fantastic form, and cracked with fissures that 
gape to swallow up the unwary traveller and bury 
him in their profound blue depths, this remarkable 
object, as may be seen in the Mer de Glace, 
possesses a wonderfully firm texture. Its ice rings 
toa blow; yet it climbs up slopes, turns the edge 
of opposing rocks, forces its way through narrow 
gorges, and, accommodating itself to the curves of 
the valley, advances with a slow but regular rate 
of progress. How this vast, continuous mass of 
ice, many miles in length and hundreds of feet in 
thickness, is displaced, and thrust forward ana 
downward into the plains, was long, but is no 
longer, a mystery. It happens thus. Each suc- 
ceeding winter covers the mountain-tops with fresh 
accumulations ofsnow. ihese, with their enormous 


134 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


weight pressing from above and behind on the 
partially plastic glacier which the frost forms out of 
their snow, force it from its birth-place to seek room 
elsewhere. It descends; it melts; and, changed 
into flowing streams, carries beauty to smiling 
valleys, and fertility to far distant plains. 

By an analogous process, men, who naturally 
cling to their birth-place, and often, like trees that 
spread their roots on a naked rock, cling to it the 
closer the poorer it is, are constrained to obey 
the original command of God, and even against 
their will, “replenish the earth.” Those Alpine 
valleys which have furnished us with a figure, fur- 
nish a remarkable example of that fact. Walled 
in by stupendous mountains, whose heads are 
crowned with eternal snows, and whose precipitous 
sides afford little else than footing for pines and 
food for wild goats, it is a very limited number of 
families they are able to support. Supplying to 
their stated inhabitants but the bare necessaries of 
life, they afford no room for increase of popula- 
tion. In consequence of this, as the birth exceeds 
the death rate, and numbers hereby accumulate, 
their pressure, like that of the snows on the 
glacier, forces the population outwards ; compelling 
them, though with bleeding hearts and tender me- 
mories of their dear mountain-home, to seek relief 
in emigration—room and bread elsewhere. Hence, 
whether born in Swiss or Italian valleys, natives of 
the Alps are met with over the whole continent. 
The ignorant and indolent of Roman Catholic 
cantons go forth to recruit the armies of despots 
and of the Pope; while on the other hand, those 
from Protestant territories are found pursuing in 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 135 


hereditary trades the arts of industry in the chief 
cities of Europe, and even on the distant shores of 
the Atlantic. 

The pressure of population on the ordinary 
means of subsistence is as much felt in a small 
country hemmed in by the sea, as in one hemmed 
in by mountains. Unlike trees whose bark expands 
with their growth, the people cooped up in such a 
country are like a man sheathed in unelastic, 
iron armor. Destitute of energy, they remain at 
home, almost always on the borders, and fre- 
quently suffering the horrors, of famine. Educated 
and enterprising, they seek an outlet. They go 
abroad ; and encountering alike the dangers of the 
sea and the hardships of the emigrant, they may 
be found in huts scattered on foreign and savage 
shores laying the foundations of future common- 
wealths. 

The latter is the part which seems to be spe- 
cially assigned in the providence of God to our 
country and our countrymen. Carrying with us 
the love of liberty, literature, and science, the useful 
and also ornamental arts, and above all that Word 
of God which bringeth salvation, one of the bright- 
est prospects in the future of our world is that 
Britons, forced by the increase of population and 
the narrow limits of their island-home to seek new 
settlements on other shores, shall be more than 
any other the chosen race to fulfil the command 
of Eden, and multiplying, “ replenish the earth.” 
With the energy of the old Scandinavians in our 
blood, with a resolution that delights to encounter 
difficulties, with a courage that is inflamed, not 
quenched, by dangers, with our ships ploughing 


136 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


every sea and our commerce connecting us with 
every shore, to us more than to any other Christian 
nation, God seems to commit the interests of hu- 
manity and the Kingdom of his Son; saying, as to 
Israel of old, Go ye in and possess the land; 
saying, as to the first disciples, Go ye into all the 
world, and preach the gospel to every creature! 
A noble destiny this !—the chief purpose, perhaps, 
for which, though occupying a small, remote, and 
stormy isle, we have grown into a mighty people, 
and fill a place in the world vastly greater than 
that which our island fills on its map. Great 
colonists as we are, and greater as, with the growth 
of our wealth and therefore of our population, we 
are likely to be, it may prove instructive and also 
interesting to look at Joshua in the character of a 
colonist—the leader of the largest band that ever 
left their old in search of a new home. The emi- 
gration which he succeeded Moses in conducting 
to a happy issue was divinely directed, as well as 
divinely appointed ; and from it our country may 
gather lessons of the greatest importance, if not 
indeed essential to the right fulfilment of its 
splendid and holy destiny. 

I remark, then, that the colonization of Canaan 
under Joshua was conducted in an orderly manner, 
on a large scale, and in a way eminently favorable 
to the happiness of the emigrants and the interests 
of virtue and religion. 

We cannot say the same of ours. Certainly not. 
Our system of emigration rends asunder the dear- 
est ties of nature, removing from the side of aged 
parents those who should tend and support them. 
It carries away the very flower of our youth; the 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 137 


enterprising ; the stout-hearted, and the strong- 
handed ; and so leaves the old country burdened 
with an undue proportion of such as are feeble 
and infirm. Our manner of emigration is attended 
with still worse, because most immoral effects. 
The largest proportion of such as seek a home in 
other lands being young men, there are too many 
women at home, and too many men abroad. The 
equality of the sexes is disturbed. God’s virtuous 
order is thrown into confusion; and the conse- 
quences, both to the old country and its colonies, 
are immoral, eminently pernicious. 

It was after another fashion that God managed 
the emigration of the Hebrews under Moses and 
Joshua. It presents us with a model we would 
do well to copy. The children of Israel entered 
Canaan to be settled within allotted borders ; by 
families and by tribes. In their case emigration 
was thus less a change of persons than a change, 
and a happy change of place. No broad seas 
rolled between the severed members of the same 
family ; there were no bitter partings of parents 
and the children they feared never more to see; 
nor did the emigrants, with sad faces and swim- 
ming eyes, stand crowded on the ship’s stern to 
watch the blue mountains of their dear native land 
as they sank beneath the wave. Now, were our 
emigrations conducted somewhat after this divine 
model, the trees, the birds, the flowers, the skies 
might differ from those of the old country, but 
with the same loved faces before them, the same 
loved voices in their ear, the same loved forms 
moving about the house, the same neighbors to 
associate and intermarry with, to rally round them 


138 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


in danger, to sit at their festive board, and at 
length carry their coffin to the grave, our emigrants 
would feel their new quarters to be home; and 
remember almost without a pang, since they had 
brought away with them those who most endeared 
it, the glen or valley, the city or village of their 
birth. See many of our colonists separated by 
broad seas from all they loved; strangers to one 
another; dwelling far apart; scattered on the 
lonely prairie or buried in the depths of gloomy 
forests; doomed to rough work and learning 
rougher manners; sighing for their old homes, 
the amenities of civilized and the sweet pleasures 
of domestic life! How enviable compared to 
theirs the circumstances of the Hebrews on the 
other side of Jordan, amid the swelling hills and 
green valleys of their adopted land! Every home- 
stead presents a picture of virtuous, domestic life. 
The aged parents, regarded with reverence and 
supported with cheerfulness, sit shadowed by vine 
and fig-tree ; while the father, leaving his plough 
in the furrow or leading his flock homeward 
at the close of day, is met by a merry band of 
children to conduct him to a home where a bright 
wife stands at the door with smiles of welcome on 
her face, one infant in her arms and another at 
her knee. 

A still more important lesson than that taught 
by the orderly, just, humane, and happy arrange- 
ments of this Hebrew colony, is taught us by the 
care Joshua took of its religious interests. These, 
the greatest, yet considered appsrently the least, 
of all interests, are sadly neglected in many of 
our foreign stations ; and I have often wondered 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 139 


to see with what little reluctance Christian parents 
could send their children away to lands where 
more lost their religion than made their fortune. 
Alas! for many of our emigrants—not scapegraces, 
but youths of fair and lovely promise—with none 
to care for their souls! The world engrosses all 
their care. No holy Sabbath renews each week 
impressions that were fading away. Seldom visited 
by any minister of the Gospel, far remote from the 
sound of the church-going bell, they grow indiffer- 
ent to the claims of religion; apathy steals over 
them like a creeping palsy ; and disgracing the 
very name of Christian, many addict themselves 
to vices which make even the heathen blush. 
Condemn the Canaanities for offering their children 
up to Moloch !—equally cruel and costly, and far 
more guilty, are the sacrifices some parents make 
of theirs to Mammon. Talk of the Old Testa- 
ment being out of date !—it were well for our 
countrymen, and the world overso many of whose 
shores our colonies are planted, if we copied the 
lessons of that divine old book. Whatever we do 
with our religion, the Hebrews did not leave the 
ark of God behind them. Regarding it as at once 
their glory and defence, they followed it into the 
bed of Jordan, and, passing the flood on foot, bore 
it with them into the adopted land. Wherever 
they pitched their tents, they set up the altar 
and tabernacle of their God. Priests and teachers 
formed part of the train; and making ample 
provision for the regular ministration of word and 
ordinance, they laid in holy and pious institutions 
the foundations of their future Commonwealth. 
Here is an example to us. Our surplus population 


140 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


must of necessity emigrate. We are furnished in 
God’s good providence with remarkable facilities 
for carrying the blessings of civilization and a 
pure gospel to the ends of the earth; I know no 
grander scheme for our country and its Christian 
patriots than a colonization formed to the utmost 
possible extent, in all its orderly arrangements, and 
family relationships, and religious provisions, on 
the model of that which Israel followed in the land 
of Canaan. We have attempted it in the New 
Zealand settlements of Canterbury and Otago on 
a small and imperfect scale. But it were as much 
to our own interest as to the good of mankind, 
that we tried it on a scale corresponding to our 
means, and the world’s clamant necessities. Such 
colonies would relieve the old country, and bless 
the new; and these, unlike the melancholy ruins 
of ancient kingdoms, depopulated regions, and 
the graves of extinct and exterminated tribes, were 
worthy footmarks for us to leave on the sands of 
time and the soil of heathen shores. 

Such are some of the points in which Joshua is 
to be admired, and imitated, as a model colonist. 
Alas! while neglecting his example in things 
worthy of imitation, we have followed it but too 
closely in the one thing where it affords us no 
precedent to follow. I refer to the fire and sword 
he carried into the land of Canaan, and his ex- 
termination of its original inhabitants. We have 
too faithfully followed him in this—with no war- 
rant, human or divine, to do so. Let me explain 
the matter. 

The day of Jericho’s doom has come. To the 
amazement first, and afterwards, no doubt, to the 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 141 


amusement of its inhabitants, the host of Israel, 
followed by the ark of God and priests with 
sounding horns, have walked on six successive 
days the round of its walls. Its inhabitants crowd- 
ing the ramparts have probably made merry with 
the Hebrews—asking, as they passed, if they ex- 
pected to throw down stone walls with rams’- 
horns instead of battering rams? and whether 
they had not had walking enough in the wilder- 
ness these past forty years, that they were taking 
this daily and very harmless turn round their 
city? With such gibes and mockery the six days 
passed on; but now the seventh, the Sabbath of 
the Lord, had come—and with it an end of their 
mirth, and of Jericho itself. Smitten, when the 
people shouted and the trumpets blew, as by the 
blast of a mine or the shock of an earthquake, 
its walls were to fall flat to the ground, and lay 
it open to the assault. And in view of that event, 
these were Joshua’s instructions: ‘‘ The city shall 
be accursed, it and all therein, to the Lord; only 
Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are 
with herinthe house.” And committing no mistake 
as to the full and bloody import of this order, the 
people, it is said, ‘utterly destroyed all that was 
in the city, both man and woman, young and old. 
Nor was the slaughter at the sack of Ai, conducted 
also under Joshua’s orders, less indiscriminating 
and wholesale. There was not, we are told, a man 
or woman but was smitten with the edge of the 
sword, the king only excepted ; and him—the last 
survivor of these stout heathens and of a miserable 
crowd of women and children—whom the people 
had taken alive and brought captive to Joshua, 


142 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Joshua carried to the smoking ruins of his home, 
and hanged onatree. These are specimens of the 
policy which the Hebrews pursued in Canaan, kill- 
ing all, without distinction of rank, or sex, or age. 
They went to the slaughter of the Canaanites as 
we should to the destruction of our sins—their eye 
did not pity and their hand did not spare. 

We naturally recoil from such scenes; and 
taking advantage of that horror of bloodshed and 
of the sufferings of innocents which God has im- 
planted in every breast, Tom Paine, and other 
ribald sceptics, have made this terrible extermina- 
tion a ground for attacking the character of 
Joshua, and denying the divine authority of the 
Bible itself. The faith of some has staggered at 
this terrible wholesale slaughter. It has disturbed 
the minds of others; and it may be well to take 
this opportunity of showing that, severe as the 
judgment was, it affords no ground whatever 
either for traducing the character of Joshua or 
doubting the divinity of Scripture. 

There have been monsters who delighted in 
cruelty, and found music in the groans of sufferers 
—popish inquisitors and persecutors, a sort of 
fiends wearing ecclesiastical habits and the human 
form, who gloated their eyes with tender maidens 
writhing on the rack,—ruthless conquerors, who 
put all, without distinction, to the sword, as deaf to 
the cries of mothers and the wails of infants as 
the steel they buried in their bowels. Joshua did 
exterminate the Canaanites ; but he is not to be 
ranked with these. The kindly terms which he 
yses tc Achan, as, bending with pity over the 
guilty man, he calls him “my son”—the high 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 143 


honor he displayed in keeping faith with the 
Gibeonites, who had so cleverly entrapped him— 
’ the dauntless courage which he carried into battle, 
with which he faced the Israelites when, maddened 
on one occasion to fury, they sought his life, and 
with which also when alone, by the walls of 
Jericho, on seeing the Lord of Hosts, in form of 
a man standing across his path with a sword 
drawn in his hand, he went up to Him with the 
brave challenge, ‘Art thou for us or for our 
adversaries ?”—the piety which raises man above 
all low and brutal passions, and ever softens the 
heart it sanctifies ; these noble features in Joshua’s 
character are incompatible with a temper that 
could find pleasure in the infliction of suffering, 
or delight in scenes of blood. It is not the pious, 
but the impious—not honorable men, but knaves 
—not the brave, but cowards, that are cruel. The 
judge is not cruel who condemns a criminal; and, 
placed in similar circumstances, no doubt Joshua, 
brave, gentle, and generous, was often agitated by 
the emotions of him who, seated on yonder bench 
of justice, with swimming eyes, and voice his rising 
feelings choke, pronounces on some pale, trembling 
wretch the dreadful doom of death. 

In his bloodiest work Joshua was acting under 
commission. His orders were clear, however terri- 
ble they read. These are his instructions, as given 
by God to Moses :—‘‘When the Lord thy God 
shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest 
to possess it, and hath cast out many nations 
before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and 
the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Periz- 
zites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seve 


144 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


nations greater and mightier than thou; and when 
the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, 
thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them, 
thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show 
mercy unto them: neither shalt thou make mar- 
riages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not 
give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou 
take unto thy son”—a terrible sentence clenched 
with this weighty reason, “ for they will turn away 
thy sons from foliowing me, that they may serve 
other gods: so wili the anger of the Lord be 
kindlec against you, and destroy thee suddenly.” 
There, God undertakes the whole responsibility. 
And be it observed that the children of Israel 
were blamed not because they did, but because 
they did not, exterminate the Canaanites,—slay- 
ing them with the sword, or driving them out of the 
land. The duty was painful and stern; but they 
lived to find, as God had warned them would happen 
to them, and as happens to us when we spare the 
sins of which these heathen were the type, that 
mercy to the Canaanites was cruelty to themselves. 

But, admitting that the responsibility is shifted 
from Joshua to God, how, it may be asked, are the 
sufferings of the Canaanites, their expulsion and 
bloody extermination from the land, to be recon- 
ciled with the character of God, as just, and good, 
and righteous? This is like many other of his 
acts. Onattempting to scrutinize them, mystery 
meets us on the threshold. No wonder !—when 
we feel constrained to exclaim even over a flake of 
snow, the spore of a fern, the leaf of a tree, the 
change of a base grub into a winged and painted 
butterfly, ‘Who can by searching find out God ! 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 148 


who can find out the Almighty unto perfection ? 
It is higher than heaven, what can we do? deeper 
than hell, what can we know ? the measure thereof 
is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.” 
Dark as the judgment on Canaan seems, a little 
consideration will show that it is no greater, nor 
so great, a mystery as many others in the provi- 
dence of God. 

The land of Canaan was his—‘‘ the earth is the 
Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And I ask in 
turn, is the Sovereign Proprietor of all to he 
denied the right that ordinary proprietors claim— 
the right to remove one set of tenants, and replace 
them by another? Besides, the inhabitants of 
Canaan were not only, so to speak, ‘‘ tenants at 
will,” but tenants of the worst description. They 
practised the grossest immoralities; even their 
religious rites were obscene. Cruel, sensual, 
devilish, they were sinners beyond other men; a 
curse to the world which they corrupted with 
their vices, and burdened with a load of guilt. 
And, therefore, unless we refuse to God the right 
we grant to inferior proprietors—that of doing 
what they will with their own, and the right also 
we grant to inferior governors—that of inflicting 
punishment on crime, God possessed an absolute 
and perfect authority, not only to remove, but to 
exterminate these idolaters out of the land, saying, 
“Thou shalt smite and utterly destroy them.” 
Let it be remarked also, that the Canaanites not 
only deserved, but chose their fate. The fame of 
what God had done for the tribes of Israel had 
preceded their arrival in the land of Canaan. 
Thus, its guilty tenants were early warned; got 


10 


146 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


“notice to quit ;” might be considered as sum- 
moned out. They refused to go. They chose 
the chances of resistance rather than quiet re- 
moval ; and so,—for be it observed that the Israel- 
ites in the first instance were only ordered to cast 
them out,—they brought destruction on themselves, 
with their own hands pulling down the house that 
buried them and their children in its ruins. 

But the children? the unoffending infants ? 
There is a mystery, I admit, an awful mystery in 
their destruction ; but no new or greater mystery 
here than meets us everywhere else. The mystery 
of offspring who suffer through their parents’ sins 
is repeated daily in our own streets. Look at 
that poor child, shivering in the winter cold, rags 
on its back and cruel hunger in its hollow cheek, 
reared in deepest ignorance and driven into crime, 
doomed to a life of infamy and of misery,—it suffers, 
the hapless victim ofa father’s drunkenness. Look 
at this wasted, withered, sallow infant, that is 
pining away to death and the mercy of the grave, 
with its little head wearily laid on the foul 
shoulders of one who has lost, with the heart, 
almost the features, of her sex,—it suffers through 
a mother’s sins. Sanitary reformers tell us, and 
tell us truly, that thousands of children die year 
by year in consequence of the foul habits and foul 
habitations of improvident and careless parents ; 
and history tells us that not thousands but mil- 
lions who did not know their right hand from their 
left, have fallen victims to wars and conflagrations, 
to earthquakes and famines, to plagues and pesti- 
lences. It does not alter the case one whit to say 
that children who die of disease, for instance, die 


JOSHUA YfHE COLONIST. 147 


by the laws of Nature, while those in Canaan were 
put to death by the command of God. This isa 
distinction without a difference; for what are the 
laws of Nature but the ordinances and will of God? 
If it is consistent with his righteous government to 
deprive an infant of life by the hand of disease, it 
is equally so to do it by the edge of the sword. 
And thus, while the death of a thousand children 
is not more mysterious than that of one, there is 
no more mystery in all the slaughtered babes of 
Canaan, than lies shrouded and shut up in the 
little coffin any sad father lays in an untimely 
grave. Nor is the cloud which here surrounds 
God’s throne, dark as it seems, without a silver 
lining. There is mercy in the death of all infants 
—the Canaanites not excepted. I feel here as I 
have often felt when gazing on the form of a dead 
child in some foul haunt of wretchedness and vice. 
To die is to go to heaven. To have lived had 
been to inherit the misery and repeat the crimes 
of parents. The sword of the Hebrew opens to 
the babes of Canaan a happy escape from misery 
and sin—a sharp but short passage to a better and 
purer world. 

Thus, and otherwise, we can justify the sternest 
deeds of which Joshua has been accused. He 
held a commission from God to enter Canaan, and 
cast out its guilty inhabitants, and, like a wood- 
man who enters the forest axe in hand, to cut 
them down if they clung like trees to its soil. 
His conduct admits of the fullest vindication ; 
and though it did not, we should be the last to 
accuse him. Ours are not the hands to cast a 
stone at Joshua. A most painful and shameful 


148 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


history than the history of some at least of our 
colonies was never written. Talk of the extermi- 
nation of the Canaanites! Where are the Indian 
tribes our settlers found roaming, in plumed and 
painted freedom, the forests of the New World ? 
Excepting a few scattered, degraded savages, all 
have disappeared from the face of the earth. We 
found Tasmania with a native population; and 
lately the only survivors were a single woman and 
some dozen men. Unless where our emigrants are 
settled on its shores, or lonely shepherds tend their 
flocks, or the gold digger toils for the treasures in 
its bowels, the Australian continent is becoming a 
solitude ; its aborigines disappearing before us 
with the strange animals that inhabit their forests 
and form their scanty food. Equally with the 
timid Bushmen and crouching Hottentot, the brave 
savages of New Zealand are vanishing before our 
vices, diseases, and fire-arms. Not more fatal to 
the Canaanites the irruption of the Hebrews than 
our arrival in almost every colony to its native 
population! We have seized their lands; and ina 
way less honorable, and even merciful, than the 
swords of Israel, have given them in return nothing 
but a grave. They have perished before our vices 
and diseases. Our presence has been their exter- 
mination ; nor is it possible for a man with a heart 
to read many pages of our colonial history without 
feelings of deepest pity and burning indignation. 
They remind us of the sad but true words of 
Fowell Buxton. The darkest day, said that 
Christian philanthropist, for many a heathen tribe 
was that which first saw the white man step upon 
theirshores Instead of a blessing, we have carried 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 149 


a blight with us. Professed followers of Him who 
came not to destroy but to save the world, we 
have entered the territories of the heathen with 
fire and sword; and adding murder to robbery, 
have spoiled the unoffending natives of their lives 
as well as of their lands. 

Had we any commission to exterminate? Di- 
vine as Joshua’s, our commission was as opposite 
to his as opposing poles to each other. These are 
its blessed terms, ‘‘Go ye into all the world and 
preach the Gospel to every creature, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost.” Can our country and its 
churches read that without a blush of shame and 
a sense of guilt? Let us repent the errors of the 
past. Not so much to aggrandize our island, as 
to Christianize the world by our colonies, is the 
noble enterprise to which Providence calls us. 
Onr sailors touch at every port; the keels of our 
ships plough every sea; our manufactures are 
borne to every shore ; our settlements are scattered 
far and wide over the whole face of the globe; and 
year by year this busy hive throws off its swarms 
to take wing in search of new settlements and 
wider homes. With its literature and language, 
with its hereditary love of adventure and indo- 
mitable vigor, with its devotion to liberty, civil 
and sacred, with the truth preached from its 
pulpits, and Bibles issued by millions from its 
printing presses, our country seems called of 
Heaven to marshal the forces of the Cross on 
the borders of heathendom, and “go in to possess 
the iand.” 

“Go ye in to possess the land,”—these, if I may 


150 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


say so, were the marching orders under which 
Joshua and Israel entered Canaan; and however 
unable they appeared, in point of numbers and 
ordinary resources, to cope with those who held 
the soil and were prepared to fight like men that 
had their homes and hearths, their wives and chil- 
dren to defend, yet then, as still, the measure of 
man’s ability is God’s command. While he denied 
them straw, Pharaoh required the Israelites to 
make bricks; and other masters may impose on 
their servants orders equally unreasonable. But 
whatever God requires of us, God will give ability 
todo. Is it to repent and be converted ? is it to 
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved ? is 
it to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts? 
is it to abstain from evil and do good? is it to 
cast sin and depravity out of our hearts, like 
Cunaanites out of the land ?—the fact that God 
has commanded us to do a thing proves that we 
can do it. So there is no Christian but may 
adopt the bold words of Paul, and say, “I can 
do all things through Christ which strengtheneth 
me.” 

Since it is so, what a noble career and rapid 
conquest were before the children of Israel? 
Sweeping over Canaan like a resistless flood, they 
might have carried all before them. What diffi- 
culties could prove too great for those who had 
God to aid them? What need had they of bridge, 
or boats, before whose feet the waters of Jordan 
fled? of engines of war, whose shout, borne on the 
air, smote the ramparts of Jericho to the ground 
with an earthquake’s reeling shock ? of allies, who 
had heaven on their side, to hurl down death from 


JOSHUA TIiK COLONIS7. I51 


the skies on their panic-stricken e1 emi¢és? How 
could they lose the fruits of vicfory over the 
retreat of whose foes night refused to throw her 
mantle, while the sun held the sky, nor sunk in 
darkness, till their bloody work was done? What 
were natural difficulties, or disparity of numbers, 
to those who entered Canaan with the promise, “If 
ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commands, 
and do them, your threshing shall reach unto the 
vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sow- 
ing time, and ye shall eat your bread unto the full, 
«nd dwell in your land safely ; and ye shall chase 
your enemies; and they shall fall before you by 
the sword ; and five of you shall chase an hundred, 
and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to 
flight !” 

With these promises Israel crossed the flood on 
foot ; yet after many years, and ample time allowed 
to exterminate all the Canaanites, we find God say- 
ing to Joshua, ‘‘ Thou art old and stricken in years, 
and there remaineth yet very much land to be 
possessed.” How true, and, alas! how sad, that 
these reproachful words admit of a wider than 
their orginal application ; one involving on the 
part of Christ’s Church deeper sin and greater 
shame! It is a long time ago, more than eighteen 
hundred years, since our Lord brought his Church 
into the world, and conducting her to the borders 
of heathenism, said, “ Go ye in to possess the land ; 
go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to 
every creature ; go, and I will be with you; go, and 
I will never leave nor forsake you.” His Church 
measures its existence not by years, but centuries. 
It has seen hundreds of generations swept into the 


152 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


tomb. Save the changeless sea and perpetual hills, 
it has seen all things changed beneath the sun; 
the religions of Egypt, and Greece, and Rome sink 
into the tide of time ; and every kingdom that 
flourished at its birth pass away from the face of 
the world. Venerable for its age, not less than for 
its truth, the Church of Christ has had time enough 
to plant the cross on every shore, and push its 
bloodless conquests into every land; yet how may 
Jesus, pointing to a world by much the larger 
portion of which remains under the dominion of 
darkness and of the devil, address her, saying, 
“Thou art old and stricken in years, and yet there 
is much land to be possessed.” 

So gigantic is the missionary work which lies 
before the Church that the old words are still 
appropriate, ‘‘The field is the world.” With ex- 
ceptions hardly deserving notice, the whole con- 
tinent of Asia, the whole continent of Africa, and, 
speaking of its original inhabitants, the whole con- 
tinent of the New World, in other words, much 
the largest portion of the globe, is “land yet to be 
possessed.” Eighteen centuries ago Christ charged 
his people to carry the tidings of salvation to the 
ends of the earth ; but thousands of millions have 
died, and hundreds of millions are living, who never 
heard his name. Was ever master so ill-served, or 
hard battle and noble victory, if I may say so, so 
defrauded of their fruits ? 

Again, much of the world, though nominally 
Christian, is “land yet to be possessed.” 

By the use of different colors an ordinary map 
of the globe is made to present a view of the 
different kingdoms into which its surface is divided, 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 153 


The same device has been applied to illustrate its 
religious as well as its political condition; and 
when the map is spread out with all those countries 
which are not Christian shaded with the sombre 
colors that symbolize their moral and spiritual 
darkness, it 1s a black picture—one to make the 
Church of Christ hang her head with shame. Yet 
all outside these darkest spaces is not enjoying the 
light of a pure gospel. Outside them, there is 
much to do; “much land to be possessed.” The 
largest portion, indeed, of what is nominally Chris- 
tian is under the dominion of one form or other of 
Antichrist. In the oid land of Canaan, the places 
from which Jebusites, and Hittites, and others, 
were expelled, came to be occupied, in part at least, 
by the Samaritan race. These, though holding a 
portion of his creed, hated the Jew; and often 
opposed him with an animosity more bitter than 
rankled in heathen breasts. And how has that 
condition of things found a counterpart in the so- 
called Christian world? A corresponding mixture 
of truth and error characterizes the Greek and 
Roman Churches. Their animosity to the true 
faith has been seldom, if ever, exceeded by heathen 
rancor: nor has Pagan Rome persecuted the 
truth more bitterly than Popish Rome has done. 
And thus in many nominally Christian countries, 
where grovelling superstitions have usurped the 
place of piety, or infidelity, eating out the vitals of 
religion, has left nothing but an empty shell, the 
Church of Christ has a great work to do—very 
much land yet to be possessed. 

Again, it is true even of our own native country 
that ‘‘there is much land yet to be possessed,” 


154 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


The eyes of a fool, says Solomon, are in the ends 
of the earth ; and however much we commend the 
zeal which has sent missionaries to the plains of 
India, the sands of Africa, and Greenland’s icy 
shores, perhaps we lie somewhat open to that 
remark. In seeking to convert the heathen abroad, | 
nave we not too much overlooked the claims of 
those at home; and, like unwise generals, pushed 
on our conquests, while leaving a formidable enemy 
in our rear? In those vast, almost unbroken 
masses, ignorance and intemperance, whose rags 
and vices, whose neglect of religious ordinances and 
moral degradation, disgrace our country and Chris- 
tian name, how much land is there yet to possess ? 
If we reckon how fast the non-church-going popula- 
tion of our large towns, and of many mining and 
manufacturing districts also, is increasing; how 
many are sinking year by year into the godless 
mass that has abandoned the house of God, and 
cast off all profession of religion; and how that 
rising flood of irreligion threatens at no distant 
period to engulf throne, and altar, and all to which 
our country owes its goodness and its greatness, 
what need is there to push on the work of Home 
as well as of Foreign Missions, and “enter in to 
possess the land !” 

In addressing ourselves to this task, we might 
take a lesson from the manner in which the twelve 
tribes took possession of the land of Canaan. God 
divided it for them into twelve different sections. 
Giving to each tribe a part, He said, as it were, 
“This is your portion, fight for it; while you help 
your brother, and your brother helps you, be this 
your sphere for work and warfare.” Thus all 


JOSHUA THE COLONIST. 155 


jealousy, envy, and discord were prevented ; the 
only rivalry between one tribe and another being 
’ who should be foremost in the work—the first to 
cast the heathen out of their borders, and possess 
the land. Had no such plan been adopted, what 
had happened ?—the tribes had fallen into quarrels ; 
and those who fought with the Canaanites had 
probably fought with each other. And, I have 
thought, it were well did the Churches of Jesus 
Christ apportion out the heathen world ; and well 
also if our different denominations, laying aside all 
haughty exclusiveness and mutual jealousies, were 
to divide the waste field at home. Then “Judah 
would no longer vex Ephraim, nor Ephraim envy 
Judah ;” and the Church, acting in harmony, march- 
ing in concert throughout all its sections, would go 
forth to the conquest of the world, to use the grand 
words of the old prophet, ‘‘clear as the sun, fair as 
the moon, and terrible as an army with banners.” 
Then, animated with one spirit, and aiming at 
one object, we might expect such success as blest 
her earliest days. What noble progress did she 
make when the dews of youth were on her? For 
one heathen converted now, hundreds were con- 
verted then. By her arms Rome subdued king- 
doms, but the Church by the preaching of the 
Gospel subdued Rome herself. Nor oppression, 
nor exile, nor bloody scaffolds, nor fiery stakes, nor 
persecution in its most appalling forms, could 
arrest her triumphant career. She entered the 
temples of idolatry, smiting down their gods as 
with an iron mace; she forced her way through 
the guards of imperial palaces; she faced all 
danger ; she overcame all opposition ; and almost 


156 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


’ 


before the last of the Apostles*was called to his 
rest, she had made the name of Christ greater than 
Czsar’s—proclaiming the faith, and planting the 
cross in every region of the then known world. 
Wherever Roman commerce sailed, she followed 
in its wake ; wherever the Roman eagles flew, she 
was there, like a dove, bearing the olive branch of 
peace. A century or two more of such progress, 
such holy energy, such self-denying zeal, and, the 
Spirit of God continuing to bless the preaching of 
the Word, the whole land had been possessed—the 
earth had been the Lord’s, and all the kingdoms 
of this world had become the kingdom of our 
Christ. Though it tarries now, that vision shall 
come; and to Him whose hand is not shortened 
that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy that it can- 
not hear, be the prayer offered till the answer 
come, ‘‘ Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O arm 
of the Lord ; awake, as in the ancient days, and in 
the days of old.” 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 157 


Caleb the Soldier. 


IT is not the quantity, but the temper of the 
metal, which makes a good sword: nor is it 
mere bulk, but a large measure of nervous and 
muscular force, which makes a strong man; and, 
in accordance with the saying of Napoleon I., that 
“moral is to physical power as three to one,” the 
wars of all ages have proved that success in battle 
does not turn so much on the multitude as on the 
morale, on the numbers as on the character, of the 
troops. 

The triumph of the Prussians, for example, in 
their late brief but bloody contest with Austria, 
was due less to the superiority of their arms than 
of their education, intelligence, and religion ; under 
Providence, these, not numbers, or the needle-gun, 
turned the fortunes of the campaign. To the same, 
or similar, moral causes Oliver Cromwell owed his 
remarkable success. Fanatics or not, right or 
wrong in their religious and political views, his 
troops were thoughtful men, of strict and even 
severe manners, within whose camps there was 
little swearing but much psalm-singing: soldiers 
who, if they did not, because they could not in 
conscience, honor the king, feared God. It was 
from their knees in silent prayer, or from public 
assemblies held for worship, those men went to 


158 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


battle, who almost never fought but they conquered, 
bearing down in the shock of arms the very flower 
and pride ot England’s chivalry. By heroic deeds 
which history records, and John Milton sang, and 
all denominations of Protestant Christians agree in 
admiring and approving, the valleys of Piedmont 
teach the same lesson. Strong were their moun- 
tain fastnesses; the dizzy crag they shared with 
the eagle ; the narrow gorge, where, with a roaring 
torrent on this side, and a dark frowning precipice 
on that, one brave man, spear in hand, or with boys 
and women at his back to load the rifles, could 
hold the pass against a thousand. Yet the salva- 
tion of the Waldenses did not lie in “‘ the munition 
of rocks.” To the morale which endured three 
centuries of the cruelest persecution, turned every 
rock into a monument, faced death on every 
meadow, and gave to every village its roll of 
martyrs, was chiefly due the illustrious spectacle 
of a handful of men defending their faith and 
country against the arms of Savoy and the perse- 
cutions of Rome. It was this which braced them 
for the struggle, and repeatedly rolled back on the 
plains of Italy the bleeding fragments of the 
mighty armies that invaded their mountain homes. 

The true defence of a country lies far more in 
the moral character and spirit of its inhabitants 
than in ships or arsenals of war ; or in the numbers 
that, soldiers by profession, form its standing army. 
This was demonstrated by America in its War of 
Independence, and also by the issue of that gigantic 
conflict which ended so well in Negro Freedom. 
Yet, where a country, surrounded with dangerous 
neighbors, has its shores, its commerce, and also 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 159 


widely-scattered colonies, to defend, a body of men 
whose trade is arms, is an institution with which it 
_may not be able to dispense. Such is the situation 
of our country. Numbering nearly 200,000 men, 
our standing army forms a very important branch 
of the public service; and, though a costly, 
a useful one, so long as, kept at the lowest possible 
figure, and confined to its own proper duties, it 
is maintained, not for the purpose of attacking 
others, but of defending ourselves. No doubt, as 
in those days when gentlemen wore swords, and 
were ready to craw them in every petty quarrel 
and drunken brawl, nations which maintain stand- 
ing armies are tempted to commit acts of violence. 
It has been too much their custom to bring ordi- 
nary questions to the arbitrament of the sword, 
and rush without consideration into the unspeak- 
able horrors and cruelties of war. These, however, 
are not the legitimate uses of such an institution. 
Circumstances may make it necessary to carry 
war beyond our shores. We may require to 
follow the example of Hannibal, who, to draw the 
enemies of his country from Carthage, invaded 
Italy, and thundered at the gates of Rome; but 
the proper motto on the banners of a standing 
as well as of a volunteer army is, Defence, and not 
Offence. In no other way can it receive, I venture 
to affirm, either the approbation of humanity or the 
sanctions of religion. 

It were a happy thing for us, and the world 
also, if we could afford to disband our army, and, 
our situation making it safe to embrace the peace 
principles of the Society of Friends, might convert 
every sword into a plowshare, and never more. 


160 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


dig iron from the earth to bury it in a brother's 
bowels. Menslaughtering each other is a spectacle 
horrid to contemplate. War, at the best, is 
a fearful necessity; and there is no doubt that 
we have rushed into many wars without any 
just or righteous cause—we have been verily 
“‘ guilty concerning our brother.” Meanwhile, how- 
ever, and till the advent of millennial days, the 
peace principles of that excellent class of citizens, 
commonly called Quakers, are a dream; and one 
from which, were we to embrace them, we should 
be rudely awakened some morning by the roar of 
cannon on our shores. 

So long as we cannot dispense with locks and 
keys to protect our goods from thieves, nor with 
police to preserve our persons from assault and 
our homes from housebreakers, it is vain to hope 
that we can dispense with the means of protecting 
our country from those who, though dignified with 
the names of conquerors, are nothing else than 
thieves and murderers. Alexander, Cesar, Napo- 
leon, differed from the felons we send to prison, or 
consign to a gallows, only in that they plundered, 
not houses, but kingdoms, and, on bloody battle- 
fields, strewed with the bodies of mangled thou- 
sands, committed not solitary, but wholesale 
slaughter. 

But while we may justify a standing army, I 
would like to ask what Christian man can justify 
those arrangements which, in so many respects, 
convert it into a standing immorality? This is 
a subject within our sphere, as Christians and 
patriots, to notice. We have here an enormous 
evil, which every lover of God, and of the souls 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 161 


of men, and of his country, should seek to amend. 
I know few things that call so loudly for reform 
as the unfavorable circumstances in which we 
place our soldiers, so far as regards especially their 
highest, their moral and religious interests. We 
owe a deep debt of gratitude to our soldiers. They 
have often defended our shores: nor, like other 
armies, the tools of ambitious tyrants or usurpers, 
have they ever turned their swords against the lives 
or liberties of those whom they were sworn to 
defend ; and therefore their comfort, their material 
happiness, their moral and religious welfare, should 
be a grateful country’s anxious care. It was emi- 
nently so in other days. It appears, for example, 
from Macaulay’s ‘History of England,’ that the 
Protector paid the common soldier nearly as much 
as we now pay our ensigns—double the wages of 
a day-laborer. His ranks, in consequence, were 
filled by a much higher and better class than our 
one shilling a day induces to become soldiers. 
Recruited with such men, and supplied with devout 
chaplains and religious ordinances, the army was 
at that time considered a school of virtue; and 
Christian parents—as none certainly would do now 
—sent their sons to its ranks to learn a pure and 
high morality. And this, to take a merely mer- 
cenary view of the matter, paid. They were “well 
worth the money.” Bringing to battle frames 
unimpaired by vice, and hearts sustained by piety, 
they formed incomparable soldiers. Their prowess 
was expressed in the name they won—‘‘ Cromwell’s 
Tronsides ;” and their high morale by the astonish- 
ing fact that twenty thousand of them were one 
day disbanded in the streets of London, threwn on 
iL 


162 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


society, cast all of a sudden out of bread and em- 
ployment, and yet were guilty of no violence, of no 
crime, of no breach of the laws. They mingled as 
quietly with the general community as a drop of 
water with the wave on whose bosom it falls. 

Let us now turn to our army, and look, for in- 
stance, at the position of a young recruit. At that 
time of life when principle is weak and passion 
strong, he is taken away from under the eye of, I 
shall say, Christian parents. He has now no 
godly father or kind mother to please or to grieve 
by his behavior. He no longer feels, in the 
respectable character of his family, and the opinion 
of decent neighbors, incentives to virtue, and a 
powerful check on vice. Shifted about from place 
to place, he gains nothing by being a moral, and 
loses nothing by being a vicious man. He is plied 
on all hands with temptations to seek relief from 
the exnuz of an idle life in the pleasures of licen- 
tiousness and debauchery. Thrown in the bar- 
rack-room into the company of depraved associates, 
he finds morality and piety held up to ridicule ; 
nor can he escape, though he would, from hearing 
and seeing what is calculated to pollute his mind, 
and blight any lingering regard he may feel for 
prayer, his Bible, the house of God, the holy Sab- 
bath, and the virtues of his father’s home. Is that 
the care which youth requires, and a Christian 
country should bestow? But it is from other 
homes, with exceptions, of course, that our army 
draws its soldiers. It is where the scum of the city 
floats, and whisky-shops flank the pavements, that 
the recruiting-sergeant spreads his net and plies 
his trade. That, surely, forms no reason, furnishes 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 163 


no excuse, for the neglect of our soldiers. On the 
contrary, I have thought, as I saw a batch of ill- 
’ fed, ill-clad, dissipated-looking lads, marched off to 
be examined as recruits, that no class of the com- 
munity, considering their unhappy antecedents, 
stood so much in need as they of being shielded 
from temptation ; and not only guarded from in- 
centives to vice, but surrounded with incentives to 
virtue. Yet, how miserably is this duty dis- 
charged? Prodigal of their blood, but parsi- 
monious of its money, the country does little, 
compared at least with what it might do, either 
to preserve or to improve the morals of its soldiers. 
The consequence is, that these, as is notorious, are 
too often of the worst description, degrading the 
men, impairing the efficiency, and adding enor- 
mously to the expense of the army. Decency 
forbids details; but they may be imagined from 
the fact that the appearance of our troops has 
struck others besides our enemies with terror— 
often filling with anxiety and dread the decent 
fathers and mothers of the provincial town where 
they were billeted and happened to sojourn. 

This is lamentable: yet the soldiers are less to 
blame than the Government ; and the Government 
than a country which sacrifices, as could be proved, 
toa false economy, the happiness as well as the 
moral and religious welfare of those it expects to 
die in its defence. People bewail the immorality 
of our soldiers. But who is chiefly to blame for 
that? As if we had never heard the proverb, 
“Idle dogs worry sheep,” or read the lines, 


«* And Satan still some mischief finds 
For idle hands to do,” 


164 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


we condemn them to a life of comparative idleness 
and dull routine ; and, worse still, in the arrange- 
ments for our army, run counter to the plainest 
laws of God. Marriage is discouraged; not dis- 
couraged only, but denied—save in exceptional 
cases. That divine institution which forms the 
only true foundation of a holy and happy society, 
is ignored ; and in its room a system of celibacy 
is practically enacted, which has in every country, 
Pagan or Popish, proved destructive of morals— 
nut excepting those of the very ministers of reli- 
gion. But why should not the soldier, as well as 
others, receive wages sufficient to maintain a wife 
and children? How can this Christian country, 
with its enormous wealth, justify itself before God 
or man for arrangements that, I may say, doom 
its soldiers to a life of vice?—a wrong that ap- 
pears all the greater when we see how, as in the 
Madras army, where their families accompany the 
troops, we grant privileges to the natives of India 
which we deny to our own countrymen. Cowards, 
’ and worshippers of Mammon, we yield to heathen- 
ism what we refuse to Christianity. We have no 
right to maintain an army at the expense of the 
moral and religious interests of its men: nor can 
any good reason be given why their pay should 
not be so augmented, and their movements so 
limited or arranged, as to allow our soldiers the 
blessings of domestic life, and a better home than 
they can ever find amid the discomforts and im- 
moralities of a barrack-room. I have mingled 
with them; I have slept in a hut; I have passed 
nights in the camp; I have conversed on these 
matters with all classes, from the general com- 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 165 


manding a brigade to the private lost in the rank 
and file; and I know not a grander object for a 
Christian statesman and patriot to take up, than 
devising a remedy for these wrongs—wrongs of 
which soldiers do not, because they dare not, 
complain. 

This picture of the morals and condition of 
our soldiers—for which, I repeat, others are more 
culpable than they—is quite consistent with the 
fact that no profession can show finer examples 
of religion than the army and navy. “All things 
are yours,” says the apostle, “and ye are Christ’s, 
and Christ is God’s;’ and among these “all 
things” are to be reckoned the temptations good 
men have to contend with—the very difficulties 
they have to encounter in maintaining their re- 
ligious profession. In this respect none, so much 
as Christian soldiers, are like gold tried in the 
fire. The flames that have consumed others seem 
only to have imparted additional lustre to them; 
the efforts they have to make to maintain their 
position but strengthening their graces, and making 
them more zealous, bold, and decided than ordi- 
nary believers. Just as mountaineers, compared 
with the inhabitants of the plain, have broader 
chests, and stronger limbs ; and just as the pines 
on Norwegian hills, that have to battle with rude 
tempests and long cold winters, make stouter masts 
than trees grown in sheltered spots; and just as 
the boatmen of isles exposed to northern storms, 
beaten by Atlantic waves, and swept by surging 
commingling tides, form braver sailors than those 
bred on the shores of inland seas, so the remark- 
able piety of such soldiers as Lieutenant-General 


156 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Monro, Colonel Gardiner, Sir Henry Havelock, 
and Hedley Vicars has been in no small measure 
due to the very difficulties they had to contend 
with, the very immoralities they had to witness, 
and the very battles they had to fight for the 
faith. Their pre-eminent piety proves, at any rate, 
what our soldiers might be; and, drafted abroad 
as they are to heathen countries, what, were they 
as pious as they are brave, they might do to re- 
commend the gospel, and carry it to the ends of 
the earth. They were models of the Christian 
soldier. Monuments of divine grace, and endur- 
ing hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, they 
were as true to the Cross as to their colors. 

Such a model we have in him whose honored 
name stands at the head of this chapter. Covered 
with the blood of a hundred battles, crowned with 
the laurels of a hundred victories, Parliament saw 
the great captain of our age stand up before the 
noblest assembly of the world to receive the thanks 
of his king and country. Caleb received a higher 
honor. Not Moses, their leader, not the as- 
sembled tribes, but God himself applauded his 
conduct and crowned his brows with the laurels of 
an immortal renown—and now taking him as our 
type and model, let us look at two of the many 
soldierly qualities by which he won the palm. 


CALEB’S FIDELITY. 


Fidelity is one of the first properties of a soldier ; 
and it were well that every good cause, and espe- 
cially that of Christ, could boast of such fidelity 
as gallant men have often shown in the ranks of 
war. Mere boys have bravely carried the colors 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 167 


of their regiment into battle ; and to save them 
from falling into the hands of the enemy, they 
have been known, when they themselves fell, to 
wrap them around their bodies, and die within 
their encrimsoned folds. An incident more heroic 
still occurred on one of those fields where Austria 
lately suffered disastrous defeat. When the bloody 
fight was over, and the victors were removing the 
wounded, they came ona young Austrian stretched 
on the ground, whose life was pouring out in the 
red streams of a ghastly wound. To their asto- 
nishment he declined their kind services. Recom- 
mending others to be removed, he implored them, 
though he might still have been saved, to let him 
alone. On returning some time afterwards they 
found him dead—all his battles o’er. But the 
mystery was explained. They raised the body to 
give it burial; and there, below him, lay the 
colors of his regiment. He had sworn not to 
part with them ; and though he clung to life, and 
tenderly thought of a mother and sisters in their 
distant home, he would not purchase recovery at 
the price of his oath, and the expense of a soldier’s 
honor—“ he was faithful unto death.” 

There was nothing in Pompeii, that most weird 
and wonderful of all cities—‘‘ city of the dead,” as 
Walter Scott kept repeating to himself when they 
bore the shattered man through its silent streets 
—that invested it with a deeper interest to me 
than the spot where a soldier of old Rome dis- 
played a most heroic fidelity. That fatal day on 
which Vesuvius, at whose feet the city stood, burst 
out into an eruption that shook the earth, poured 
torrents of lava from its riven sides, and discharged, 


168 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


amid the noise of a hundred thunders, such clouds 
of ashes as filled the air, produced a darkness 
deeper than midnight, and struck such terror into 
all hearts, that men thought not only that the end 
of the world had come and all must die, but that 
the gods themselves were expiring,—on that night 
a sentinel kept watch by the gate which looked 
to the burning mountain. Amid unimaginable 
confusion and shrieks of terror mingling with the 
roar of the volcano, and cries of mothers who had 
lost their children in the darkness, the inhabitants 
fled the fatal town, while the falling ashes, load- 
ing the darkened air, and penetrating every place, 
rose in the streets till they covered the house-roofs, 
nor left a vestige of the city but a vast silent 
mound, beneath which it lay unknown, dead and 
buried, for nearly 1700 years. Amid this fearful 
disorder the sentinel at the gate had been for- 
gotten; and as Rome required her sentinels, 
happen what might, to hold their posts till relieved 
by the guard or set at liberty by their officers, 
he had to choose between death or dishonor. 
Pattern of fidelity, he stood by his post. Slowly 
but surely, the ashes rise on his manly form ; now 
they reach his breast ; and now covering his lips, 
they choke his breathing. He also was “ faithful 
unto death.” After seventeen centuries they found 
his skeleton standing erect in a marble niche, clad 
in its rusty armor—the helmet on his empty skull, 
and his bony fingers still closed upon his spear. 
And next almost to the interest I felt in placing 
myself on the spot where Paul, true to his colors, 
when all men deserted him, plead before the Roman. 
tyrant, was the interest I felt in the niche by the 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 169 


city gate where they found the skeleton of one 
who, in his fidelity to the cause of Cesar, sets 
- us an example of faithfulness to the cause of 
Christ—an example it were for the honor of 
their Master that all his servants followed. 

This property of a good soldier was eminently 
illustrated by Caleb. One of the twelve heads of 
the tribes of Israel, whom Moses selected to spy 
out the promised land, he entered Canaan along 
with Joshua and the other ten—travelling from its 
southernmost to its northern border. In this ex- 
pedition his fidelity and courage do not appear to 
have been put to the test. Nor is it difficult to 
explain how this happened, and they were able 
to execute their commission without being sus- 
pected of the character, or suffering the fate of 
spies—safe from the dangers to which the two 
men were exposed who, forty years afterwards, 
were sent into Jericho. 

Caleb and his associates entered the land of 
Canaan little more than twelve months after Israel] 
had left that of Egypt. At this time, no report 
of what had happened there seemed to have 
reached the Canaanites. But when the host, after 
wandering in the wilderness for forty years, re- 
turned to the borders of the promised land, they 
found its inhabitants, as well they might be, all 
on the alert—the whole country alarmed by re- 
ports, which fame would not lessen but rather 
exaggcrate, of how the host that approached their 
borders had been miraculously sustained in the 
wilderness, and how, aided by Jehovah, they had 
trodden in the dust the greatest kings and nations 
that had attempted ta oppose their progress. It 


170 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


was not till Caleb returned to the camp of Israel 
that, as I proceed now to show, he met with 
anything to put his fidelity to the test, and bring 
it out, an illustrious example to future ages. 

The news that the spies are returning flies like 
wildfire through the tents, and calls for all the 
people. There they come—browned with the sun 
and dust of travel. They bring proofs of the 
fertility of the soil in the fruits which they hold 
in their hands ; and in that one bunch of grapes, 
a cluster so weighty, that it requires two men 
to carry. The camp is full of joy; and every ear 
intent as, addressing Moses in the hearing of the 
people, the spies say—‘‘ We came into the land 
whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with 
milk and honey ; and this is the fruit of it.” Alas! 
their joy is short-lived. How are their hearts 
struck with dread, and the hopes they have che- 
rished changed into blank despair, as the spies go 
on to say—‘‘ Nevertheless the people be strong, 
and the cities are walled, and very great ;” adding, 
with voices that trembled at the recollection of 
their gigantic forms, ‘‘and we saw the children of 
Anak there!” The children of Anak? At this 
news the whole congregation grows pale with 
terror. Fear sits on every face; and expresses 
itself in a low murmuring wail that, unless it 
meets a timely check, will ere long break out into 
open mutiny. At this crisis Caleb interposes—not 
to deny the statement of his associates, but to 
repudiate the cowardly conclusion they suggested, 
and the people accepted. Faithful to the cause of 
God, he rushes to the front to deliver himself of 
words full of faith and courage. They sound like 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 171 


a battle trumpet. No doubt the Canaanites are 
strong ; their walls are high; their ranks led on 
by giant warriors, the formidable sons of Anak. 
Nevertheless, as one who knew that He who was 
with them was greater than all who could be 
against them, Caleb cries out, ‘‘Let us go up at 
once and possess it ; we are well able to overcome 
ie. 

So he spake. But ere Joshua, if we may judge 
from the narrative, has time to second him, and 
echo this heroic address, the other spies interpose. 
Now painting matters darker than at first, they 
complete the panic, saying, ‘‘ All the people that 
we saw in it are men of great stature ; and there 
we saw the giants, the sons of Anak; and we were 
in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were 
in theirs!” At these words, as if a thunderbolt, 
or shell, had dropt among them, the multitude 
suddenly disperse. Through the livelong night 
weeping fills the camp; nor does joy come in the 
morning. They have abandoned themselves to 
despair. Regretting that they had ever left the 
land of Egypt, they resolve to retrace their steps. 
They cast blame on God; and give way to such 
grief, and rage, and wild, blind fury, that Moses 
and Aaron are confounded. Knowing neither what 
to do, nor how to turn the people from their mad 
purpose, they fall on their faces; and lie on the 
ground—as if they said, If you will go back to 
Egypt, it is over our bodies you shall go! At this 
moment, though it was like laying hands on the 
mane of a raging lion, Caleb, supported by Joshua, 
once more steps forward ; and regardless of a life 
the people had armed themselves with stones to 


172 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


destroy, he reproaches their cowardice, saying, 
“Rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye 
the people of the land; for they are bread to us, 
their defence is departed from them. The Lord 
is with us; fear them not!” Another moment, 
and, his life battered out of him by a shower of 
stones, Caleb had fallen a sacrifice to his own 
fidelity, and the people’s fury. But suddenly, in 
the form of some brilliant, dazzling, intolerable 
light, the well-known symbol of the divine pre- 
sence, “the glory of the Lord appears in the 
tabernacle before all the children of Israel.” They, 
not Caleb and Joshua, nor Moses and Aaron, are 
in peril now. God is ready to destroy them ; and 
they had been swept from the face of the earth 
but for Moses’ earnest and timely intercession. 
They are doomed for their sin to wander forty 
years in the wilderness, until the carcases of all 
who were over twenty years of age on leaving 
Egypt have fallen there. God forgives them. 
Merciful and gracious, He forgets their offence, 
but not Caleb’s fidelity. ‘‘Surely,” he says, ‘‘ they 
shall not see the land, but my servant Caleb, be- 
cause he had another spirit with him and hath 
followed me fully, him will I bring into the land 
whereunto he went ; and his seed shall possess it.” 
Even so shall it be with all who, faithful to the 
sacred interests of their Heavenly Master, prove 
themselves good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Remem- 
bering their fidelity in the hour of trial, how they 
stood by His cause, resisted temptations, by faith 
crucified the flesh, by the blood of the covenant 
overcame the world, how they denied themselves 
but not Him, how they were of “another spirit” 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 173 


from the mass of mere professors, and how in 
purpose, if not always in practice, they ‘‘ followed 
the Lord fully,” them also will He bring into the 
land whither they go—the ransomed of the Lord, a 
sacramental host, pilgrims to the Heavenly Canaan. 


CALEB’S COURAGE. 


Courag2, which has in all ages won the praise of 
poets and admiration of mankind, is a property 
for which our seamen and soldiers have been long 
and eminently distinguished. Descended from 
ancestors who met the Romans on the sea-beach, 
and those brave Norsemen who ploughed the 
stormiest oceans with their warlike prows, our 
countrymen have proved themselves worthy of 
their sires; and the repute of a courage which 
has been tested in many a hard-fought field, has 
_ proved, under God, the strongest bulwark of our 
island-home. It is remarkable, and highly credit- 
able to the resolution and bravery of our soldiers, 
that, notwithstanding all the wars in which they 
have engaged, no foreign nation flaunts a flag of 
ours as the trophy of its victory, and of our defeat. 
No British banner, so far as I know, hangs droop- 
ing in dusty folds from the walls of foreign castle 
or cathedral to make us blush; nor in that proud 
pillar the great Napoleon raised, whose bronze, 
formed of the cannon taken by him in battle, com- 
memorates his victories, is there an ounce of metal 
that belonged to a British gun. I have heard 
indeed how cowards, probably drawn from the 
scum of the people, hung back when the bugler 
in the trenches sounded a new assault; and rev 
fused to cross ground so strewed with their fallen 


174 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


comrades as to resemble a field carpeted with 
scarlet cloth. Yet, whatever may be their defects, 
our soldiers have been commonly as much dis- 
tinguished for their courage when the battle raged, 
as for their clemency when the victory was won. 
For that courage, true, calm courage, which does 
not lie in insensibility to danger, nor in the violent 
animal passion which may bear a coward forward 
as a whirlwind does the dust, or a wave the sea- 
weed on its foaming crest, Caleb presents the very 
model of a soldier. How bravely he bears himself 
when the other spies prove traitors! With fire 
in his eye and resolution seated on his brow, he 
steps forth to cry, ‘‘Let us go up at once and 
possess the land !—Away with these coward fears !” 
The speech this, be it observed, not of one who 
was to guard the camp or bring up the rear. 
Judah’s place is in the front of battle. The 
bloody wave breaks first on that gallant tribe; 
and of all its warriors, first on Caleb—its prince 
and head. Nor was this bold proposal to face 
and fight the sons of Anak, an empty boast, a 
mere bravado. Forty years thereafter his courage 
was put to that test—the portion of the land 
assigned him, at his own request, being held by 
the giant race whose descendant, Goliath of Gath, 
struck terror into the boldest hearts in Israel, as 
he went forth vaporing before their host—till he 
fell to the shepherd’s sling, defying the armies of 
the living God. It was from the hands of giants 
Caleb wrung his inheritance. Undaunted by their 
towering stature, he met them, sword to sword, 
foot to foot, in the bloody field; the God in whom 
he trusted inspiring his heart with such courage 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 175 


and endowing his arm with such strength, that they 
succumbed before his blows—their armor loudly 
- clashing, and the very earth shaking in their fall. 

The source of Caleb’s courage, of a bravery so 
admirable and dauntless, is not far to seek. In 
him, as in those noble Christian soldiers whom I 
have mentioned, and in others also who have main- 
tained their religion in the camp, courage, if it did 
not spring from, was sustained by piety. He had 
faith in God. Therefore he did not fear the face 
of man, though that man were a giant; nor of 
death itself. From the same lofty source, and 
none other, the soldier of the cross, he who fights 
with foes more formidable than giants—the devil, 
the world, and the flesh, that trinity of evil—is 
to draw his courage. No grace more necessary 
than that in one who would do his duty to Jesus, 
and to His cause. Courage to speak for Christ 
everywhere, and act for Christ always, is a grace 
of the highest value—yet one in which, alas! many 
a good man, to the dishonor of his Master, and 
the loss of others, has been sadly wanting. The 
Apostle Paul possessed it: and what he himself 
possessed in a degree so eminent, he enforced on 
his converts, saying, “‘ Add to your faith virtue,” or, 
as it were better translated, “courage.” No greater 
bravery, indeed, in battlefields than what the 
Christian may require! More of it may be needed 
to face the jeers of an ungodly world than a blaz- 
ing battery of cannon. 

In illustration of this, hear what a nobleman of 
ancient family, and high rank, and still higher 
piety, has written in a very precious record which 
was lately given to the public: —‘‘I felt,” he 


176 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


says, ‘that salvation must be sought and attained, 
though the path to it lay through fire and water, 
and that no hardships were worth a moment’s con- 
sideration in comparison of so great a prize. In 
the same manner the pursuits of my life hitherto 
appeared utterly frivolous. They could not ad- 
vance me one step on the road to heaven. I 
resolved to make an entire change in my life, to 
spend the whole day in the service of God, and 
devote myself entirely to the promotion of His 
glory. Yet how to begin, I knew not. I felt [ 
ought earnestly to address every one I met, be- 
ginning with my own servants; that I ought to 
speak out, and not sneak into heaven by the back 
door. For several days, however, I did nothing. 
I shrunk from the idea of declaring myself, and 
dreaded the remarks of relatives, acquaintances, 
and servants. I seriously debated with myself, 
since society presented such great difficulties in 
our way, whether we should not leave all, and fly 
with our children to a distant land: where, living 
quite unknown, we might commence our new life 
with fewer outward impediments, and spend our days 
in prayer, praise, and preaching to others Christ’s 
gospel of salvation. It was in my mind to give 
up our inheritance, reserving only enough for our 
bare support, and, taking leave of all our connec- 
tions, to burn, as it were, our ships behind us, and, 
dying to this world, to live entirely for the next. 
To the objection that we should be deserting the 
station in which God had placed us, I urged that 
our first duty is the care of our own souls. I 
compared it to Lot flying out of Sodom. In 
giving up my hereditary rank and riches, I con- 


CALEB THE SOLDIER. 177 


sidered that I should injure no one. My children 
being brought up in total ignorance of their origin, 
would have no cause for regret, and, if religion be 
true, they would be incalculable gainers, since 
riches (if Christ be an authority) are a great 
hindrance in the way to heaven. For several 
days I debated this question with myself, and one 
consideration alone determined my conclusion on 
it in the negative. I could not reconcile it with 
my duty to leave my aged father.” 

These are the touching words of one who lived 
to openly avow his change, and confess Christ 
before the world. He added to his faith courage. 
His circumstances needed it, and so—though per- 
haps toa less degree—do those of the humblest 
Christians. Nor shall we go without it, if we seek 
God’s help, the aids of His Holy Spirit. He that 
gave Nicodemus, who once came stealing to Jesus 
under the cloud of night, courage to perform the 
last kind offices to the dead, and boldly attend 
the funeral ; He who gave the disciple, that denied 
his Master before a woman, courage to confess him 
before all the Jews, and charge home on them the 
guilt of his innocent blood; He will make his 
feeblest followers “‘ valiant for the truth ”—bold to 
avow themselves the followers of Jesus, and say— 


«¢ Tm not ashamed to own my Lord, 
Or to defend His cause, 
Maintain the glory of His cross, 
And honor all his laws. 


** Jesus, my Lord, I know His name, 
His name is all my boast; 
Nor will He leave my soul to shame, 
Nor let my hope be lost.” 
ig 


178 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Boaz the Farmer. 


FARMING, rather than gardening in the ordi- 
nary sense of the word, is man’s oldest occu- 
pation: in point of time, at least, claiming 
priority of all others. It may not be esteemed 
the most dignified one, nor may those engaged in 
it be generally found either the most enlightened 
or refined of men ; still, instituted by Divine autho- 
rity, and pursued by man in his primeval innocence, 
with the ordinances of marriage and the Sabbath- 
day, it is a vestige of Eden. Thus, though rustic 
and doorish, terms of reproach, be borrowed from 
country life, and the author of Ecclesiasticus held 
those engaged in its pursuits so cheap as to say, 
“‘Seek not counsel of him whose talk is of bullocks,” 
the business of a farmer, as regards both its age 
and origin, is invested with a dignity that belongs 
to no other profession. 

«« The sacred plow 


Employed the kings and fathers of mankind 
In ancient times.” 


Besides, it is probable, if not certain, that it is 
the one employment in which man had God for 
his teacher. The heathens themselves represent 
the gods as having taught him how to cultivate 
corn; and in this, as in many of their other 





BOAZ THE FARMER. 179 


segends, they have preserved a valuable fragment 
of ancient truth. While some trades are of very 


_ recent origin, photography, for example, and while 


many have advanced to their present stage of per- 
fection by slow steps, as spinning, from the simple 
distaff, still generally used im Brittany and occasion- 
ally in our remotest Highlands, to the complicated 
machines that whirl amid the dust and din of 
crowded factories, it is a remarkable fact that the 
cereal grasses, wheat, barley, and other grains 
which the farmer now cultivates, were cultivated 
four thousand years ago. Forming new fabrics; 
discovering new metals ; learning how, as in ships, 
to make irom swim—the sun, as in photographs, 
to paint portraits—the lightning, as in telegraphs, 
to carry messages—and fire and water, as in loco- 
motives, to whirl us along the ground with the 
speed of an eagle’s wing—man has, to use the 
words of Scripture, even im our own time, “found 
out many inventions.” Yet he has not added one 
to the number of our cereals during the last four 
thousand years. He appears in fact to have 
started on his career with a knowledge of these ; 
a knowledge he could have obtained from none 
but God. Heit was who taught him the arts of 
agriculture—what plants to cultivate, and how to 
cultivate them. There is that indeed in the nature 
of wheat, barley, and the other cereals, which goes 
almost to demonstrate that God specially created 
them for man’s use, and originally committed them 
to his care. These plants are unique in two re- 
spects—first, unlike others, the fruits or roots of 
which we use for food, they are found wild nowhere 
on the face of the whole earth; and secondly, 


180 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


unlike others also, they cannot prolong their exist- 
ence independent of man, without his care and 
culture. 

For example, let a field which has been sown 
with wheat, barley, or oats, be abandoned to the 
course of nature—and what happens? The follow- 
ing year a scanty crop, springing from the grain 
it shed, may rise in thin stalks on the uncultivated 
soil: but in a few summers more, every vestige 
of it has vanished, ‘‘ nor left a wrack behind.” 

A more than curious, this is an important fact. 
It proves that those grains which form his main 
subsistence cannot maintain themselves without 
the hand and help of man; and proving that, it 
proves this also, that man started on his career a 
tiller of the ground—no such being as infidels in 
their hatred of the Bible represent him to have 
been—a naked savage, ignorant alike of arts and 
letters, little raised in intelligence above the wild 
animals in whose dens he sought a home, and of 
whose prey he sought a share. This fact in 
Natural History corroborates the testimony of 
Scripture; and shows us, in fields where every 
stalk stands up a living witness for the truth of 
the Bible, the revelations of God’s Word visibly 
written on the face of Nature. Waving with golden 
corn, and sounding with the songs of reapers, these 
fields carry the thoughtful mind back to the days 
when God first set man to till the ground ; and, 
suggestive of Eden, they prompt the wish that 
with its primeval employments more of its primeval 
mnocence were found among our rural population. 

The scene before me, as I write these words, 
suggests another view of the occupation in which 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 181 


Boaz spent his days. Beyond the estuary of the 
Dee, over whose broad sands, celebrated in tragic 
- song, the tide, flecked with the sails of shipping 
craft and fishing-boats, has rolled, lies, a few miles 
off, the winding shore of Wales—the land rising 
gently from the beach in corn and pasture fields 
to heights over which a picturesque range of moun- 
tains heaves itself up against the evening sky. 
Along that low shore lie scattered towns and 
villages, whose tall chimneys, dwarfing tower and 
steeple, pour out their smoke to pollute the air, 
and cast a murky veil on the smiling face of nature. 
These bespeak the trades they pursue who, leaving 
the husbandman to his cheerful labors on the 
green surface of the earth, penetrate its bowels to 
rob them of their hidden treasures—the mine of 
its coals, and the mountains of their metals. But 
these—valuable as they are, many hands as they 
employ, and much as they contribute to the in- 
fluence and wealth of our country—are undergoing 
a process of exhaustion. Some think we shall 
soon reach their limit ; and are already bewailing 
the prospect when, with fires quenched in ruined 
furnaces, and spindles rusting in silent mills, and 
ships rotting in unfrequented harbors, Britain 
shall bid a long farewell to all her greatness. But 
when mines are empty, and furnaces stand 
quenched and cold, and deep silence reigns in the 
caverns where the axe of the pitman sounded, the 
husbandman shall still plow the soil. His, the 
first man’s, shall probably be the last man’s em- 
ployment. Continued throughout those millennial 
years when with swords turned into plowshares 
and spears into pruning hooks, “the whole earth 


182 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


is at rest, and is quiet,’ the archangel’s trumpet 
shall scare the peasant at the plow, or summon 
him from the harvest-field. Fit emblem of the 
blessings of saving grace, the bounties of the soil 
are exhaustless. Husbandry will thus prove, as 
it is the oldest, the most permanent of all employ- 
ments; and, since it produces the nation’s food, 
and is according to many the true source of its 
wealth, there is none with which the public welfare 
is so extensively and intimately bound up. 

The occupation which Boaz followed rises still 
higher in importance when we look at the multi- 
tudes it employs. Great as we are in commerce 
and manufactures—clothing nations with our 
fabrics, covering every sea with ships, and carry- 
ing the produce of our arts to every shore—the 
cultivation of the soil employs a larger number 
of hands than any other trade. And thus if “the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number” be a 
sound and noble adage, the temporal, moral, and 
spiritual interests of our agricultural population 
should bulk very large in the eyes of Christian 
patriots. Now these interests turn to a great 
extent on the manner in which those who follow 
Boaz’s occupation discharge their duties: and it is 
therefore a matter of thankfulness that in him the 
Book which instructs both kings and beggars, peers 
and peasants, how to live, sets before us a model 
farmer. Happy our country were all its farmers 
like him, and all their servants like his !—making 
rural innocence a reality; not merely a poet’s 
dream, or the graceful ornament of a speech. Let 
us study this pattern. 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 183 


HIS DILIGENCE IN BUSINESS. 


Boaz was not one whom necessity compelled to 
labor. He was rich; and is indeed called ‘a 
mighty man of wealth.” Yet he made that no 
reason for wasting his life in ease and idleness. 
Nor though, as appears from the Scripture narra- 
tive, he employed overseers—men no doubt of 
character and integrity—did he consider it right to 
commit his business entirely into their hands. 
Here is a lesson for us. 

In the first place, such irresponsibility is not 
good for servants. It places them in circumstances 
of temptation to act dishonestly ; and yielding to 
temptations to which no man is justified in un- 
necessarily exposing others, many a good servant 
has had his ruin to lay at the door of a too easy 
and confiding master. Neither is it, in the second 
place, for the master’s interests. The eve of the 
master maketh a fat horse, says an English Proverb. 
The farmer ploughs best with his feet, says a Scotch 
one—his success turning on the attention he per- 
sonally gives to the superintendence of his servants 
and the different interests of his farm. Boaz in the 
field among his reapers, or at the winnowing season 
foregoing the luxury of a bed to sleep at the back 
of a heap of corn, that, losing no time in travelling 
between his house and the distant threshing-floor, 
he might resume his work by the break of day, is 
an example of these old, wise adages; and how, 
pattern to others as well as farmers, a Christian 
should be—as the Apostle says, and Jesus was— 
“not slothful in business,” while ‘‘ fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord.” Religion, sanctifying the secu- 


184 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


larities of life, does not teach us to neglect our 
business ; but, on the contrary, to attend to it— 
making it as much our duty to repair to our farm, 
or shop, or counting-house, during the week, as, 
turning our back on them and dismissing their 
cares from our minds, to repair to church on the 
Lord’s Day. 

The hand of the diligent, says the wise man, 
maketh rich. It does more: Boaz’s industry pro- 
bably contributed as much to his moral safety as 
to his material wealth. Neither in the inspired 
Bible, nor elsewhere, is there a more important 
practical truth than that expressed by the epigram- 
matic saying, Zhe devil tempts every man, but an 
zdle man tempts the devil: and thus it is best for 
men themselves—and for others also—when their 
circumstances impose on them a life of constant 
industry. Those engaged in Boaz’s pursuits form 
no exception to that adage ; as was remarkably 
illustrated by the state of a country parish with 
which I was once acquainted. Many of its farms 
were held on life-leases, and at very low rents ; but 
the rest were let at prices which required their 
tenants to be industrious and economical. And so 
inferior in point of culture was the first class to the 
second, that a stranger could have told which was 
which. Nor were the advantages of a condition 
which neither permits nor fosters idleness less 
visible in the character of the farmers, than in the 
condition of the farms. With exceptions of course 
on both sides, those who could not meet term-day 
without being diligent in business, were respectable 
in character, men of sober habits, wealthy and well 
to do; while not a few of the others became bank: 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 185 


rupts—some living as much bankrupt in character, 
as they died insolvent in circumstances. The bird 
that ceases to use its wings does not hang in mid- 
air, but drops like a stone to the ground ; and bya 
law almost as certain, he sinks into evil habits 
whose time and faculties are not engaged in inno- 
cent and good employments. So much is this the 
case, that though periods ofrelaxation are desirable, 
there is danger in unduly prolonging them. ‘‘ There 
are few indeed,” says Addison in the Spectator, 
“who know how to be idle and innocent: every 
diversion they take is at the expense of some one 
virtue or another, and their very first step out of 
business is into vice or folly.” The purest water 
left to stagnate grows putrid; and the finest soil 
thrown into fallow soon throws upacrop of weeds. 
Had David, as in other days, followed his army to 
the battle-field, he had perilled his life, but saved 
his character; escaping a temptation that owed 
perhaps more than half its power to the luxurious 
ease and idleness of a palace. Idleness is the 
mother of mischief: and who would keep their 
hands from doing wrong must employ them in 
doing good. 

But this can only be done to the advantage of 
others, as well as of ourselves, by imitating the 
diligence of Boaz. ‘Slothful in business,” he had 
not been in circumstances to be generous as well 
as just. I have had much to do with begging of a 
kind; and have often observed that those were 
most distinguished for their munificence in charities 
who were most distinguished for their diligence in 
business. It gives the ability to bless others; and 
in that a good man will find ample reasons for 


186 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


managing his affairs with diligence and discretion 
—making it a matter, not of choice, but of con- 
science. If we do not need money, others do. 
Many good and noble causes, like Ruth, require 
assistance ; nor can any but those who are careful 
of their affairs afford to deal with them as Boaz 
with the widow, whom he generously invited to the 
bounties of his table—besides, with such a delicate 
regard to her feelings as reflected the highest 
credit on his own, whispering to his servants, “ Let 
her glean among the sheaves, and let fall some 
handfuls on purpose for her.” 

Here is a pattern to copy ; and a noble incentive 
to diligence in business—one which, though we 
take a long step from the case of this honorable 
man to that of a thief, Paul employed, saying, 
‘‘Let him who stole steal no more; but rather let 
him labor, working with his hands the thing which 
is good, that he may have to give to him that 
needeth.” For this end, men who could afford to 
retire from business have continued in it. Instead 
of seeking rest in the evening of life, they have 
labored on to its close; they have denied them- 
selves for Him who denied himself for them; and 
that they might have to give to such as lacked, 
toiled on till the oar dropped from their weary 
hands. Far more than the life of the hermit who 
retires to cloister or mossy cell, that he may pass 
the long day in solitude and alone with God, or 
that of one who occupies his whole time with 
religious speculations, or the ordinary duties of 
devotion, is his a religious life who for such an 
object holds his post to the last; continuing dili- 
gent in business, that he may have wherewithal to 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 187 


glorify God, assist the cause of the Redeemer, and 
bless humanity—that he may be a husband of the 
widow, and a father of the fatherless ; that he may 
reclaim the lapsed, and raise the fallen, and whether 
they be the godless at home or the heathen abroad, 
save such as are ready to perish. 


HIS COURTEOUSNESS. 


“Be ye courteous” is a duty which Paul—him- 
self a fine example of it—enjoins on Christians. 
He who began his defence before Agrippa in this 
graceful fashion—‘‘I think myself happy, King 
Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this 
day before thee touching all the things whereof I 
am accused of the Jews ; especially because I know 
thee to be expert in allcustoms and questions 
which are among the Jews: wherefore I beseech 
thee to hear me patiently’—was no rude, coarse, 
vulgar man. His was courtesy to a superior; but 
a still finer ornament of manners, and of religion 
also, is a courtesy to inferiors. And what a fine 
example of that is Boaz! It is with no cold looks, 
nor distant air, nor rough speech, nor haughty 
bearing, making his reapers painfully sensible of 
their inferiority—that they are servants and he 
their master—Boaz enters the harvest field. ‘‘ The 
master!” spoken by one who has espied him ap- 
proaching—words that strike with dread the noisy 
urchins of a school—neither turns their mirth into 
silence, nor makes them start to reluctant labors. 
Benevolence beams forth in his looks; and as the 
children who have attended their mothers to the 
field, won of old by his gifts and ready smile, run 


188 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


to meet him, he approaches with kindness on his 
lips. These are not sealed in cold silence, or 
opened but to find fault with his servants, and 
address them roughly. ‘The Lord be with you,” 
is his salutation. They, dropping work, face round, 
sickles in hand, health in their ruddy cheeks, and 
the sweat of honest labor on their brows, to wel- 
come their master, and, his inferiors in rank, but 
his equals in pious courtesy, to reply, “ The Lord 
bless thee!” More beautiful than the morning, 
with its dews sparkling like diamonds on the grass, 
and its golden beams tipping the surrounding hills 
of Bethlehem, these morning salutations between 
master and servants! Loving him, they esteemed 
his interests their own. 

These beautiful expressions, as might be inferred 
from the words of the 129th Psalm: ‘‘ Let them be 
as the grass upon the house-tops, which withereth 
afore it groweth up; wherewith the mower filleth 
not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his 
bosom; neither do they which go by say, The 
blessing of the Lord be upon you: we bless you in 
the name of the Lord,” may possibly have grown 
into a custom. Be it so. It was a very good 
custom. It had its root in the kindly relations 
that subsisted in these happy days between masters 
and servants ; and the lack of which in ours breeds 
the jealousies that ever and anon break out in the 
unhappy strikes that entail such pecuniary losses 
on the employers, and such bitter sufferings on the 
families of the employed. Whatever may have 
been the case with others, Boaz’s courtesy was 
more than a form of speech—that French polite- 
ness, so often like the French polish which imparts 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 189 


to mean timber the lustre of fine-grained woods. 
His conduct corresponded with his speech. Ob- 
serve the eye of compassion he cast on Ruth; his 
kindness to the lonely stranger; the delicacy with 
which he sought to save her feelings while he 
relieved her poverty; the respect he showed to 
her misfortunes and her generous attachment to 
Naomi. He paid as much honor to the virtues 
and feelings of this poor gleaner as if she had been 
the finest lady in the land. Behold true courteous- 
ness ! 

This grace is a great set-off to piety. As such 
it should be assiduously cultivated by all who 
desire to ‘‘adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour” 
—religion associated with a kind and courteous 
manner, being, to use Solomon’s figure, like ‘‘apples 
of gold in pictures of silver.” 

Nor is there any reason, as the case of Boaz 
proves, why courteousness should be foreign to a 
country life; or rural scenes should breed rude 
manners. No doubt those who reside in towns, 
being brought in frequent contact with others, 
acquire a polish more readily than country people 
—even as the stones on the sea-beach become 
rounded and smooth by the tides that roll them 
against each other. Allowance is to be made for 
this, and other disadvantages which belong to 
country life. For candor requires us, in judging 
others, to take into account the drawbacks of their 
position ; that every profession has its own peculiar 
temptations ; and that censorious people will find 
it easier to condemn the faults of others, than they 
would, were they in their circumstances, to avoid 
them. The cultivator, like the lord of the sail, 


190 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


seldom meets his superiors; and even his equals 
much less frequently than the citizen, who, on 
crowded ’change and busy streets, comes in daily 
contact with many, of talents, acquirements, and 
position as good as his own. Walking his farm as 
a little kingdom—as the captain of a man-of-war 
his quarter-deck—and surrounded only by servants 
and inferiors, the circumstances of a farmer are not 
the most conducive to the acquisition of very 
courteous manners. Yet what he, as well as all 
other masters, may and should be is seen in Boaz. 
A farmer, he was in the old, true sense of the 
word every inch a gentleman ; pious, yet of polished 
manners ; wealthy, yet gracious to the poor, and 
esteeming virtue above rank or riches; with de- 
pendents, yet treating the humblest of them with 
respectful courtesy ; one in whom were beautifully 
blended the politeness of a court and the simple 
virtues of a country life. 

A good practical lesson may be learned from the 
way in which this man bore himself toward his 
inferiors. It is by no means uncommon to hear 
servants, our peasantry, and the common people 
blamed for their rude and vulgar manners. But 
they who censure what I do not altogether deny, 
far less commend, would do well to remember that 
there were more servants courteous as those of 
Boaz, were there more masters like him. Why 
are the lower classes not respectful to the superior? 
May it not be, and is it not true to a large extent, 
that the latter are not respectful to them? Like 
begets like, they say ; and of that, so far as courte- 
ousness is concerned, France, and other countries 
of the Continent, furnish remarkable illustrations, 


BOAZ THE FARMER. Ce) | 


One of their pleasant features is the respectful 
manner which the upper classes show to the 
humbler, with which a master addresses his own 
servant. The result is that the lower catch the 
manners of the upper classes, and are not rude, 
because they are not rudely treated. Men are 
like mirrors ; they reflect the features of those that 
look at them. 

We, Britons, plume ourselves on our superiority 
to our neighbors in morals and religion. But 
why should not religion, in begetting kind and 
courteous manners, do as much, and more for us 
than nature or fashion does for them? What rude 
and unmannerly language have I heard addressed 
to servants! How little do many scruple to wound 
the feelings of their inferiors !—a vulgar and cow- 
ardly, as well as an unchristian thing. They 
cannot return the blow; and it is like striking a 
man when he is down. Courteousness lies in a 
due regard to the feelings of others, and is a 
Christian duty. Paul enforced it by his precepts, 
and illustrated it by his example. The whole tone 
and tenor of the Bible teaches us to be gentle ; to 
be courteous as well as kind; to esteem men of 
low degree; to be kindly affectioned one toward 
another ; ana so to bear ourselves to our inferiors 
as to make them forget, rather than remember, 
their inferiority. The followers of Jesus are to 
be humble, not haughty—“ clothed with humility,” 
says the Apostle : a robe, next to the righteousness 
which, covering all our sins, was woven on Calvary 
and dyed white in the blood of Christ, the fairest 
man can wear, 


192 STUDIES OF CHARACTEK. 


HIS PIETY. 


“The Lord be with you”—his address to the 
reapers on entering the harvest-field—has the ring 
of sterling metal. What a contrast Boaz offers 
to farmers we have known, by whose lips God’s 
name was frequently profaned, but never honored 
—their servants, like their dogs and horses, being 
often cursed, but never once blessed! And in 
accordance with the apothegm, Lzke master like 
man, what shocking oaths have we heard, volleying 
as it were out of the mouth of hell, from the lips 
of coarse, animal, sensual farm-servants ! 

Boaz almost never opens his mouth but pearls 
drop out. His speech breathes forth pious utter- 
ances. All his conversation is seasoned with grace ; 
and, though the result of a divine change of heart, 
how natural his religion seems !—not like a gala- 
dress assumed for the occasion—not like gum- 
flowers worn for ornament, but such as spring 
living from the sward—not like an artificial per- 
fume that imparts a passing odor to a thing that 
is dead, but the odors exhaled by roses or lilies 
bathed in the dews of heaven. One who could 
say, “I have set the Lord always before me.” 
God is in all the good man’s thoughts; and His 
noly name as often in his mouth to be honored, 
as it isin others to be profaned. Though it may 
have been a common custom to bless the harvest 
and its reapers, he did it from his heart ; nor were 
they words of course, or custom, he spoke when 
bending on Ruth an eye of mingled pity and 
admiration, he said, “It hath fully been showed 
me all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 193 


since the death of thine husband: and how thou 
hast left thy father, and thy mother, and the land 
of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which 
thou knewest not heretofore. The Lord remember 
thy work ; and a full reward be given thee of the 
Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art 
come to trust.” 

Nor was it only in the language of piety that 
his piety expressed itself. It did not evaporate in 
words. We have heard him speak, see how he 
acts! One night sleeping by a heap of corn, alone 
as he supposed, he wakes to find a woman lying 
at his feet. It is Ruth. Instructed by Naomi, 
she takes this strange Jewish fashion—of which, as 
of herself, in a future chapter, we shall have more 
to say—to seek her rights, and commit her fortunes 
into his hands. There is not in all history a pass- 
age more honorable to true religion than the 
story of that midnight meeting. Silver seven 
times purified never shone brighter, as it flowed 
from the glowing furnace, than Boaz’s high prin- 
ciples then and there—not purer or brighter the 
stars that looked down on the scene of such a trial, 
and such atriumph. The house of God, the holy 
table where, by the symbols of Christ’s bloody 
death, saints have held high intercourse with 
heaven, never begot purer thoughts than this 
threshing-floor that night. A noble contrast to 
such as, disgracing their profession, have received 
women beneath their roof to undermine their 
virtue and work their ruin, Boaz, in his fear of 
God and sacred regard to a poor gleaner’s gooa 
name, is a pattern to all men. Ruling his own 
spirit, he stands there “‘ better than he that taketh 

13 


194 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


a city.” He is enrolled among the progenitors 
of the Messiah; nor, take him for all in all, was 
there one in the list of whom Christ had less 
cause to be ashamed; more worthy to be the 
ancestor of an incarnate God, of Him who was 
“holy, harmless, and undefiled, separate from 
sinners.” 


HIS CARE FOR THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS 
INTERESTS OF HIS SERVANTS. 


Boaz in his- own life set them an example of 
piety which could hardly fail to produce a favor- 
able impression on their minds. Some are content 
to get work out of their servants; they take no 
interest in their souls—no more than if, like the 
cattle they tend, they had no souls at all. Un- 
like these, Boaz spoke to his servants as a God- 
fearing man. One who felt himself responsible to 
God and to their parents also, he charged himself 
’ with the care of their morals. This appears in the 
warnings and kind instructions he gave both to 
them and to Ruth. So soon as he found her in 
his fields she became the object not of his compas- 
sion only, but of his pious regards; and though 
but a poor gléeaner, nor servant of his at all, he teok 
as much pains to protect her from contamination, 
or insult, as if she had been his own daughter. 

People speak of Model Farms. In the best 
sense of the expression his was one; and farmers 
will find in his care for the virtuous and religious 
interests of his servants a most excellent pattern 
to copy. There is great need they should. Many 
are more careful about their cattle and crops thar 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 195 


of their children and servants—of the hours they 
keep; of the manner in which they spend their 
Sabbaths ; of their associates; of the dangers to 
which the nature of their work exposes them; and 
above all of their being often left, and sometimes, 
I may say, forced, to seek company and courtship 
under the cloud of night. It were as reasonable 
to look for grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles, 
as for a pious and moral population in some parts 
of the country. 

Look for example at that gang system of young 
men and women working together in the fields 
without any proper guardianship, which, prevailing 
everywhere to some extent, has assumed in England 
such proportions of iniquity, cruelty, and evil, as 
to call—and not too soon—for the exposures of 
the press, and the interference of Parliament. 


“‘Tho system of organized labor, known by the name of ‘ Agri- 
cultural Gangs,’ exists,’’ say the Commissioners, ‘‘in Lincolnshire, 
Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Notting- 
hamshire ; and, in a few instances, in the counties of Northamp- 
ton, Bedford, andRutland. They consist of the gang-master and 
a number of women and young persons of both sexes from six to 
eighteen years ofage. The numbers in each gang are from ten to 
forty. The whole number of boys and girls employed in the pub- 
lic gangs amounts to about 7,000, and in the private to as many 
os 20,000.” 


These gangs are engaged in out-door work; and 
hell and heaven hardly offer a stronger contrast 
than the fields where Boaz went with pious salata- 
tions, and those where these unhappy creatures 
are brutally treated, and initiated in very childhood 
into the practice of the grossest vices. For the 
cruelty of the system, let us hear a mother, Mrs. 


196 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Adams, the wife of a laborer in Huntingdonshire. 
She says: 


“In June, 1862, my daughters, Harriet and Sarah, aged respect- 
ively eleven and thirteen years, were engaged to work on Mr. 
Worman’s land at Stilton. When they got there he took them to 
near Peterborough : there they worked for six weeks, going and 
returning each day. The distance each way is eight miles, so 
that they had to walk sixteen miles each day on all the six work- 
ing days of the week, besides working in the field from eight 
o’clock to five or half-past in the afternoon. They used to start 
from home at five in the morning, and seldom got back before 
nine. They had to find all their own meals, as well as their own 
tools (such as hoes). They (the girls) were good for nothing at 
the end of the six weeks. The ganger persuaded me to send my 
little girl Susan, who was then six years of age. She walked all 
the way (eight miles) to Peterborough to her work, and worked 
from eight o’clock to half-past five and received fourpence. She 
was that tired that her sisters had to carry her the best part of 
the way home—eight miles, and she wasill from it for three weeks, 
and never went again.” 


For its immoral results, amply testified to by 
others, take the evidence of Dr. Morris, of Spald- 
ing, as read by the Earl of Shaftesbury in the 
House of Lords: 


‘«T have been in practice in the town of Spalding for twenty-five 
years, and during the greater portion of this time I have been 
medical officer to the Spalding Union Infirmary. I am convinced 
that the gang system is the cause of much immorality. The evil 
in the system is the mixture of the sexes in ths case of boys and 
gizls of twelve to seventeen years of age under no proper control. 
The gangers, as you know, take the work of the farmers. Thoir 
custom is to pay their children once a week at some beer-houss, 
and it is no uncommon thing for their children to be kept waiting 
at the place till eleven or twelve o’clockat night. Atthe infirmary 
many girls of fourteen years of age, and even girls of thirteen, up to 
seventeen years of age, have been brought in pregnant to be confin- 
ed there. The girls have acknowledged that their ruin has taken 
place in this gang work. ‘The offence is committed in going or 
returning from their work Girls and boys of this age go five, six 
or even seven miles to work, walking in droves aJong the roads 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 197 


and by-lanss. I have myself witnessed gross indecencies between 
boys and girls of fourteen to sixteen years of age. I once saw a 
young girl insulted by some five or six boys on the road-side. 
Other older persons were about twenty or thirty yards off, but 
they took no notice. The girl was calling out, which caused me 
tostop. Ihave also seen boys bathing in the brooks, and girls 
between thirteen and nineteen looking on from the bank.” 


We used to speak of slave-grown cotton being 
wet with the tears, and dyed with the blood of 
injured humanity ; but it is at a price as high it 
seems that some of England’s counties grow their 
corn ! 

Happily such wrongs and immoralities are not 
general, far less universal. Yet it must be con- 
fessed that there is a lamentable amount of im- 
morality among the population of most, if not all, 
of our country districts. Take this illustration 
from a Report on the state of Religion and Morals 
by a committee of the Free Church of Scotland: 


**« As much of the district we visited was agricultural, our atten- 
tion was specially directed to the moral and spiritual condition of 
the agricultural class. We found, that overall the country, a 
large number of boys and girls, from nine to fifteen or sixteen 
years of age, were engaged for about eight months of the year in 
herding cattle. Being the children of poor parents, they wers 
but half-educated when they entered on this work. They were 
employed in it both Sabbath-day and week-day, and seldom had 
an opportunity of attending the house of God or the Sabbath- 
school. Except in the few cases where the master was a religious 
man, or some member of the family took an interest in the spiritual 
well-being of dependents, their spiritual good was entirely neglect- 
ed. Asa class, they seemed never to have been much thought of. 
As it is from them, as they grow up, the farm-servant class, male 
and female, is taken, may we not discover in this sad treatment of 
our herd boys and girls, one of the chief causes of that thought- 
lessness, indifference, and immorality, which to so great an extent 
distinguish our agricultural population? We found many admira- 
ble specimens of God-fearing men and women among them. 
These, howeer, are the exceptions. One of the most difficult 


198 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


positions at present for the maintenance of a consistent and faith- 
ful adherence to Christ is, we believe, that of a farm-servant. As 
a class they are truthful and sober. It is only at feeing markets, 
which are the curse of a place, they think that they are at liberty 
to get drunk, without much guilt attaching to them. There is 
much profanity, however, among them; and we were grieved to 
hear that the sin of swearing was becoming very common among 
the young in some parts we visited, arising, as some thought, from 
the sojourn of gangs of nayvies there, when the railways of the 
north were being made. In many of the districts, particularly 
within the bounds of the Presbyteries of Elgin and Strathbogie, 
the farm servants in large numbers absent themselves from the 
house of God. They look on that day as their own, and consider 
that no master or mistress has a right even to ask them how they 
spend it. It is employed as a day of visiting and feasting in each 
other’s bothies. In many cases, it is true, they are never asked 
to join in worship with the family they serve, even if a family 
altar is kept up in the house; and in those instances in which 
they are invited, a number of them refuse to attend. 

‘The great sin of this class is illegitimacy. It is most preva- 
lent in Banffshire and some sections of Morayshire. No country 
district which your deputies visited is, however, exempt from it. 
It is one of those questions which the Church is urgently called 
to consider as she has never yet done, and the more so, as it is 
found that it is a sin which has a tendency to perpetuate itself, 
for it is no uncommon thing to find generations of illegitimates. 
When we come to examine into the social causes of it, much 
perplexity overhangs the subject. We find it as prevalent in the 
districts of small farms as of large. We find it to be no less so 
where there are no bothies, but where the farmer is assisted in 
farm-work by his own sons and daughters, as where there are 
bothies. 

‘¢Some of the causes to which its prevalence is attributed we 
found to be— 

«(1.) Constant changes of place, for which such facilities are 
afforded by feeing markets: and thus the evil habits of one dis- 
trict are introduced into others. The length of service seldom 
exceeds six months 

««(2.) The religious neglect of this class generally by their 
masters. 

‘« (3.) The fearfully low tone of feeling prevalent on the subject.” 


What can be worse than the conversation often 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 199 


held in barns and fields where there is none to 
restrain its polluted flow? and do not the reports 
of the Registrars under the head of illegitimate 
births, while unveiling but a portion of the immo- 
rality, disclose enough to make our land ashamed 
of its vices, and our churches of their apathy ? 
Not that these reports afford a fair criterion by 
which to determine the comparative morality of 
town and country. Reading them, we might sup- 
pose that virtue, unlike those plants that decay on 
being removed from the pure air of the country, 
thrives best in a smoky atmosphere ; and had fled 
from hill and dale, rural scenes and peasant cot- 
tages, to reside in towns. This were a great 
mistake. Such tables illustrate the paradox that 
facts are sometimes more deceptive even than 
figures. There may be the greatest immorality 
under certain forms, where it presents the least 
appearance. Much of the vice of cities finds no 
place in the reports of Registrars ; but, so far as 
these are concerned, flows like the foul sewers that 
lie below the streets, concealed from public view. 
With the view of applying a cure, a more im- 
portant matter than the relative merits, or de- 
merits, of town and country is, to discover the 
causes—always allowing for the depravity of our 
nature—to which the immoralities of our rural 
districts may be ascribed. In the first place, these 
may lie to no small extent in the laxity of the 
churches. The discipline which our Lord and his 
apostles committed to their successors has no 
existence in many places, and is in others but a 
name and mockery. The holy Sacrament of the 
Supper, with the ordinance of Baptism, is ad- 


200 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


ministered to all and sundry, without any respect 
to qualifications or character. It is proper to ac- 
knowledge this—Let ‘judgment begin at the 
house of God.” And when He, as of old, may 
say, “‘ Her priests have violated my law, and have 
profaned mine holy things ; they have put no dif- 
ference between the holy and the profane, neither 
have they showed difference between the clean and 
unclean,” no wonder that the standard of morality 
is low. We cannot expect it to be raised till the 
churches resume the use of the keys, and their 
ministers, breaking free from the trammels of a 
spurious delicacy, openly denounce the vices that 
are eating like a cancer into the bosom of society. 
Were this done with something of the love of John 
the Apostle, and the fire of John the Baptist, 
hearers would cease to complain of sermons being 
“flat and unprofitable,” and preachers of being 
surrounded by drowsy congregations. 

But, in the second place, much of the abounding 
immorality is due to the negligence of parents, of 
the master and mistress of the household or farm, 
of those who can take a close and daily care of 
the morals of such as they have in charge. Let 
every man that has a farm, every man indeed that 
is a master, take Boaz for his model! It is not 
enough that they do not corrupt their servants, 
and may hold in deserved abhorrence the villain 
who receives some poor girl into his house to work 
her ruin and to blast her character. How many 
do not take sufficient care to prevent those whom 
they would not corrupt from being corrupted! 
Their moral and spiritual interests are sacrificed 
to indifference, to economy, to convenience—ser- 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 201 


vants being exposed in the house and field to the 
“ evil communications whichcorrupt good manners,” 
to temptations to which no man with a proper 
regard to her virtue would expose his own daughter. 
This is wrong. It wrongs servants, who have a 
strong claim on our kind and Christian interest— 
it wrongs the parents, who, perhaps with trembling 
hearts and many prayers, have committed them 
to our charge—it wrongs the country, whose morals 
and happiness should be our care—it wrongs God, 
who is no respecter of persons, and cares as much 
for a humble servant as for a lordly master—it 
wrongs the Saviour, who died for them, and having 
taken their form, has a peculiar sympathy with 
servants: and last of all, it wrongs ourselves, as 
many shall find on meeting Him who reckoned 
with Cain for his brother, saying, ‘‘Where is thy 
brother Abel ?” 
Let it not be supposed from these remarks that 
I do not love the people as well as the scenes 
of the country; or am ignorant of how much 
that is lovely and excellent, fair and honest, good 
and pious, dwells in farm homestead and lowly 
cottage. 
“Sure peace is his : a solid life, estranged 

To disappointment, and fallacious hope ; 

Rich in content, in Nature’s bounty rich, 

In herbs and fruits : whatever greens the Spring, 

When heaven descends in showers ; or bends the bouga, 

When Summer reddens, and when Autumn beams ; 

Or in the Wintry glebe whatever lies 

Concealed, and fattens with the richest sap : 

These are not wanting ; nor the milky drove, 

Luxuriant, spread o’er all the lowing vale ; 

Nor bleating mountains ; nor the chide of streams 

And § um of bees, inviting sleep sincere 


202 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Into the guileless breast, beneath the shade, 

Or thrown at large amid the fragrant hay ; 

Nor aught beside of prospect, grove, or song, 
Dim grottoes, gleaming lakes, and fountain clear. 
Here too lives simple truth: plain innocence ; 
Unsullied beauty ; sound, unbroken youth, 
Patient of labor, with a little pleased ; 

Health ever bloomiug ; unambitious toil.” 


It has been my privilege and happiness to have 
seen beautiful examples of rural piety. Indeed, 
the deepest early impressions of reverence I can 
recall were made by a near relative, who was a 
farmer. Born in the early part of the last century, 
remembering the rebellion of 1745, he was an old 
man before I could know him. The weight of 
nearly fourscore years and ten had not bent his 
form, which was still straight as a lance; but his 
voice was low and tremulous, his step short and 
feeble, and his long spare locks as white as driven 
snow. His appearance was at all times venerable ; 
but at the table, when seated beside his aged 
partner, bowed down and blind with years—also 
a devout Christian, though of stern mould, who 
fasted one whole day each week, nor ever told 
husband or children, why—his manner when he 
asked the blessing rose into the sublime. Un- 
covering his aged head, taking off the broad bonnet 
which, the fashion of his early days, he wore to 
the last, he turned his face upwards with an expres- 
sion of deep solemnity. There was a moment’s 
silence, as if he was gathering up all his mind to 
enter the presence of a Heavenly Majesty. And 
when the blessing came forth in slow, and solemn, 
and trembling accents, what a contrast it afforded 
to the mumbled, curt, hurried ‘‘For what we are 


BOAZ THE FARMER. 203 


to receive, the Lord make us thankful,” we often 
hear! The words were few and well chosen; but 
there was that in the old man’s voice, face, and 
manner, which communicated feelings of solemnity 
even to thoughtless childhood—the venerable wor- 
shipper looking like one that stood before the 
throne, and saw the august Being whom he ad- 
dressed. 

These early impressions of rural piety were not 
impaired by the seven years I spent as the minister 
of a country parish. Numbering about a thousand 
inhabitants, there was only one man of the whole 
number who did not attend the house of God— 
and he was half crazy; there was also but one of 
years to read who could not—and he was no native, 
but an interloper ; and among the common people 
there was not one who could properly be called a 
drunkard—not even the old soldier, who occasion- 
ally exceeded on pension-day. With a parish 
library, both secular and religious, resorted to by 
many readers ; with a parish savings’-bank, set on 
foot to promote habits of temperance and economy, 
in which I left, on being called to Edinburgh, many 
hundred pounds, the savings of honest industry ; 
with a church, and besides a number of Sunday, 
two day schools, we were more than a match for 
the one public-house, which, situated, fortunately 
for us, on our boundary, drew most of its money 
from the tipplers of the neighboring town. There 
I learned to love the country, and form a high 
estimate of the kindness and sobriety, of the virtues 
and piety, of a well-ordered rural population. ‘‘ The 
lines had fallen to me in pleasant places.” The 
moral aspects were much in harmony with the phy- 


204 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


sical of a scene where the fields yielded abundant 
harvests, and the air, loaded with the fragrant 
perfume of flowers, rung to the song of larks and 
woodland birds, and long lines of breakers gleamed 
and boomed upon the shore, and ships with white 
sails flecked the blue ocean, and the Bell Rock 
tower stood up on its rim to shoot cheerful beams 
athwart the gloom of night ; a type of that Church 
which, our guide to the desired haven, is founded 
on a rock, and fearless of the rage of storms. 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 205 


Buth the Virtuous. 


APART from the interest which belongs to 
a noble character and romantic fortunes, the story 
of Ruth is interesting for the light it throws on 
her country and the manners of her age. It 
appears that Canaan, the land of her adoption, 
had suffered one of those famines which are the 
scourge of tropical and semi-tropical climes. 
Indeed, the Book of Ruth opens with one; and 
it is on it, in God’s providence, the tale turns. 
No scourge in the hand of the Almighty, neither 
pestilence nor the sword, is more terrible than 
famine. Look at the prophet’s picture of a starv- 
ing people—‘ Their visage is blacker than a coal ; 
they are not known in the streets; their skin 
cleaveth to their bones ; it is withered, it is become 
like a stick; they that be slain with the sword 
are better than they that be slain with hunger, for 
they pine away stricken through for want of the 
fruits of the earth ; the hands of the pitiful women 
have sodden their own children; they were their 
meat in the destruction of the daughter of my 
people.” Or look at the spectacle which met 
Elijah’s eyes on his approach to Zarephath !—a 
woman wasted to a skeleton; picking up, as she 
totters along with slow and feeble steps, a few 
sticks to prepare her own and her son’s last earthly 


206 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


meal. Or look at Orissa, in our Indian empire, 
where last year the sides of the roads and streets 
were covered with the dead and dying; and a 
million of our fellow-subjects perished of starva- 
tion through the failure of their crops. Our 
gratitude may find food in famines; and such 
scenes may well reconcile us to the chilling fogs, 
and cutting winds, and cold stormy winters of 
a land where an equable and moderate climate 
crowns the labors of the husbandman, and ex- 
empts its inhabitants from horrors amid which 
“children cry for bread, and their mothers have 
none to give them.” 

Happily unfamiliar with the scourge that drove 
Naomi and her husband to the land of Moab— 
where the whole family were to find bread, and 
the two sons to find wives—this Book presents us 
with a very familiar scene ; nor any more pleasant 
to look on. Here, when autumn has tinted the 
woods, and mornings are bright and bracing, and 
the dews hang, sparkling like liquid diamonds, on 
bush and tree, is a field crowded with joyous 
reapers, behind whom, as armed with peaceful steel 
they go down in lines on the golden corn, come 
straggling gleaners—God’s peculiar care—the poor, 
the infirm, widowed women, orphans, and little 
children. Ere Poor-laws came to dry up, ard 
changes in agriculture to divert from their old 
channels, many a stream of charity, such were 
the scenes our own fields presented; and it was 
a spectacle creditable to humanity, and to those 
who gave the poor free scope to roam and glean 
among the stubble. But observe that yonder, 
where Ruth and others follow the reapers, they 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 207 


have not to ask permission. They have a right 
to glean; nor dare any churlish Nabal drive them 
from his field, as trespassers. This is one of many 
beautiful and touching instances of God’s pity for 
the poor. He who made the heavens and the 
earth made statutes in Israel for their special 
protection. By these they had a right at law to 
glean—to enter field or vineyard, and eat their 
full—to gather the crop that grew in the corners 
of the corn-fields—to claim the whole produce of 
the land in its every seventh year of rest. Re- 
minded of such beneficent laws, may we not glean 
another lesson from the story of the gleaner ?— 
this, 1amely, that though these arrangements, being 
Jewish, are not binding on us as Christians, yet, as 
Christians, we ought to cherish their spirit, and see 
God, in His care for the widow, the fatherless and 
the friendless, the stranger and the orphan, setting 
us an example that we should follow His steps. 
The simple as well as kindly manners of Ruth’s 
days, as they also are brought out in her history, 
lend it a peculiar interest. The claims of a com- 
mon brotherhood, overlying all conventional dis- 
tinctions, were acknowledged then as they are not 
now. With a piety foreign to the spirit of the 
French Revolution, there was much of what its 
leaders professed to aim at, and described by the 
Shibboleth of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. 
See in yonder field with what kind familiarity Boaz 
bears himself to his servants ; more, indeed, like a 
father, or a friend, than a master. He accosts 
them with his blessing; and they bless him in 
return. Many of our small farmers have to 
undergo the toil, and are little raised above the 


208 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


rank of servants—and were, perhaps, happier if 
they were servants. But Boaz, unlike these, is 
a man of mark in the country—‘‘a mighty man 
of wealth,” the Bible calls him. Yet, so far from 
treating those who serve him as the clods among 
his feet, he sits down to eat with them; and, 
too good and great a man to sacrifice the claims 
of humanity to a false pride and fancied dignity, 
he invites even the poor gleaner to draw near, 
and share in the common meal. Thousands now- 
a-days are brought to poverty by their improvi- 
dence, and not a few by their dissipated habits ; 
but in these old and more virtuous times poverty 
was justly regarded as a misfortune rather thar 
a crime; and so, Ruth, at Boaz’s invitation, takes 
her place in the circle where ‘‘he sat beside the 
reapers.” There, instead of commanding his ser- 
vants to help her, he himself supplies her wants—- 
knowing how much more that would enhance the 
kindness. It is said “‘he reached her parched 
corn;” and, supplied by no niggard hand, such 
as in some houses weighs out the servants’ food, 
‘‘she did eat, and was sufficed, and left.” 

There was a time, also, in our own country, 
when, with certain distinctive arrangements of 
place and food, master and servants sat at the 
same board; and by this primitive custom, as 
they elsewhere and at another table recognized 
each other as brethren in Christ, recognized each 
other as brethren in Adam—equally the children 
of Him who hath made of one blood all the 
families of the earth. This was a kindly old cus- 
tom. I am not aware that it weakened the au- 
thority of masters, or fostered pride and pre- 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 209 


sumption in their servants; and it may admit of 
question whether the change of manners which has 
placed the two classes so far apart has been for 
the benefit of either—has to any extent compen- 
sated for the lack of those kindly feelings and 
that mutual interest which used to subsist between 
them, for 


‘The constant service of the antique world, 
When service sweat for duty, not for meed.” 


In the old times of Ruth, before national cor- 
ruption came in with national wealth, the morals” 
of the people seem to have been as pure as their 
habits were temperate, and their manners simple. 
Had it been otherwise, would Naomi have exposed 
her daughter-in-law to such an interview as she 
held with Boaz—alone on the threshing-floor, and 
under the cloud of night? No doubt a marriage 
between him and Ruth would have greatly pro- 
moted her interest as well as her daughter-in-law’s. 
There have been mothers so debased as to traffic 
with their daughters’ virtue; and others, hardly 
less criminal, who, for the sake of higher wages 
or the chance of an advantageous marriage, have 
exposed their principles and their persons to im- 
minent danger of contamination. But, whatever 
the loose principles of some mothers, unless the 
age in which Naomi lived had been distinguished 
by purity of morals as well as by simplicity of 
manners, I cannot believe that this venerable and 
virtuous matron would have ventured on what 
had been a very perilous experiment. Admitting 
this, as in justice to Naomi we should, I am not 
prepared, though God overruled it for the good 

14 


210 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


of all parties, to justify the step she took. And 
supposing it could be justified, if we knew ail 
that was peculiar to her time and circumstances, 
her conduct would form no precedent, no example 
for others to follow. Our rule is not the example 
of Naomi, or the success of her experiment, but 
this plain word of God—‘ Let him that thinketh 
he standeth take heed lest he fall.” We are never 
to forget that, in respect of all sins, our safety 
ordinarily lies in keeping out of the way of 
temptation—not in fighting the devil, but in fleeing 
from him—in avoiding the approach as well as 
“the appearance of evil”—in carefully acting up 
to the spirit of the petition, ‘‘Lead us not into 
temptation!” We walk in slippery places. And 
such as do so have need to take care how they 
walk ; ever praying, “‘ Lord, hold up my goings, 
that my footsteps slip not !” 

The part Ruth acted in the affair of her inter- 
view with Boaz presents a state of matters and of 
manners very different from ours. Indeed, were 
a woman now-a-days to use such a liberty, her 
conduct would be justly pronounced not impreper 
only, but immodest—since modesty is the hasd- 
maid of virtue, very strange, at least, in a woma2a 
of unsullied reputation. Such was Ruth’s: “ All 
the city of my people,” said Boaz, ‘doth know 
that thou art a virtuous woman.” 

To form a proper estimate of her conduct in this 
transaction, we must not only take into account 
that she, a stranger to the habits of the people, 
acted under the advice of an aged and pious 
matron, but that, according to the Mosaic law, as 
appears from the twenty-fifth chapter of Deuter- 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 211 


onomy, she was entitled, if not required, to claim 
marriage at the hand of her dead husband’s nearest 
kinsman, as, ignorant that another was nearer, she 
believed Boazto be. Norcan she be justly blamed 
for claiming a right which God sanctioned, if He 
did not positively enjoin. Why the overture made 
to Boaz was not made in other, and what would 
seem more prudent, circumstances, I cannot say. 
To us it appears a strange step she took in seeking 
him in a lonely place, and at the midnight hour. 
There may have been reasons for it of which we 
are ignorant. Perhaps it was the custom of the 
country. If so, it was one certainly not to be 
commended. However, let justice be done to 
Ruth. Her whole conduct, and that also of Boaz, 
in their perilous circumstances, is eminently pure 
and honorable; nor does her reply to his ques- 
tion, though it sound strange in our ears, form 
any exception to that remark. Waking at the 
dead of night, by the faint light of harvest-moon 
or stars, he sees the dim form of a woman stretched 
out at his feet. Starting up amazed, he cries, 
‘““Who art thou?”’—a question which, no doubt 
expecting, she answers, saying, ‘I am Ruth;” 
adding, ‘‘Spread therefore thy skirt over thine 
handmaid, for thou art a near kinsman.” £vz/ to 
him who evil thinks. In this speech no immo- 
desty stains the lips of Ruth, or casts the breath 
of suspicion on her character. Every country has 
customs, and modes of expression, peculiar to 
itself ; and this which she employed was that fol- 
lowed by the Jewish women when in circumstances 
akin to hers, they claimed marriage of their nearest 


212 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


kinsman—the rights, in fact, of the living and the 
dead. 

The marriage that resulted from this strange, 
short courtship presents another phase of the 
simple manners of these early days. While Roman 
Catholics, though advocating celibacy, exalt mar- 
riage into a sacrament, and others, who do not 
go that length, regard it as an ordinance where 
the hand of priest, or presbyter, is required te 
tie the knot, Boaz and Ruth went about forming 
this connexion after the simplest fashion; and in 
a way, I may remark, quite in harmony with the 
spirit of the marriage-law of Scotland. The morn- 
ing succeeding their interview, he seats himself at 
the city-gate. The man who was a degree more 
nearly related to Ruth than he, approaches to 
pass out. His steps are suddenly arrested. ‘‘ Ho! 
such-an-one,” cries Boaz; ‘“‘turn aside, and sit 
down here!” When he had done so, with ten 
of the elders of the city as witnesses and judges 
in the cause, Boaz relates the matter in hand ; and 
as this man had at law a prior claim to Ruth’s 
hand, he offers her in marriage to him. He de- 
clines to avail himself of his rights; and thus 
leaves the way clear for Boaz. He himself now 
claims her; and she consents. The elders with 
the people being taken to witness that they become 
man and wife with their free, mutual, honest con- 
sent, they are married. That constitutes the mar- 
riage. However proper may be our custom of ac- 
companying marriage with religious services, there 
was on that occasion no such ceremony ; nothing 
more than the blessing, not of any ecclesiastic, 
but of the elders and people, who say, ‘‘ The Lord 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 213 


make the woman who is to come into thine house 
like Rachel and like Leah, which two did -build the 
house of Israel ; and do thou worthily in Ephratah 
and be famous in Bethlehem !” 

This blessing on their nuptials was answered 
in a way none present perhaps ever dreamt of— 
events hanging on the marriage that had been so 
lovingly yet simply entered on, which still direct 
the steps of travellers to its scene, and have made 
the city of Ruth and Boaz famous in the annals of 
time, and in the everlasting memories of eternity. 
It was here that David, Ruth’s great-grandson, 
tended his father’s sheep. The hills around heard 
the first feeble notes of the harp that banished the 
evil spirit from the breast of Saul, and has charmed 
the Church of God, through successive ages, with 
its inspired and sacred melodies. These hills saw 
the brave boy encounter both the lion and the 
bear; and, as he plucked the prey from their 
bloody jaws, win victories that were his confidence 
when, accepting the challenge of the giant, he said, 
““The Lord that delivered me from the paw of the 
lion and the paw of the bear, He will deliver me 
out of the hand of this Philistine.” But Ruth 
was the ancestress, and Bethlehem the birthplace, 
of a greater than David. There, the Son of God 
drew his first breath ; there, the Sun of Righteous- 
ness arose on a benighted world, with healing in 
his wings; there, the fountain of salvation, the 
waters of which if a man drink he shall never 
thirst more, sprung up sparkling into the light 
of day. It was in the city where Ruth was mar- 
ried, the Saviour of the world was born: it was 
among these hills the shepherds watched their 


214 STUDIES OF Ci:ARACTER. 


flocks by night ; it was over the very fields trodden 
by this gleaner’s feet, the glory of the Lord shone 
forth, and the midnight sky suddenly became filled 
with angels, and mortal ears heard those immortals 
sing, ‘‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace, good-will toward men.” 

But from the scenery and incidents of the story 
let us now turn to her who is its principal charac- 
ter. Honored above all others of her sex, she is 
the only woman that gives her name to a Scripture 
Book—a famous queen excepted, whose life, equally 
characterized by remarkable interpositions of pro- 
vidence, was even still more romantic. Though 
Ruth’s career was certainly less brilliant than Es- 
ther’s, her story is more instructive ; more sug- 
gestive of useful lessons to the mass of readers. 
Esther moved in a palace ; but Ruth playing her 
part on the common stage of life, teaches thousands 
how to act, who have no chance of rising to royal 
dignity, and to whom, unless in so far as they 
illustrate a presiding Providence, it is a matter of 
indifference by what steps a beautiful slave became 
the choice of a king and the partner of his throne. 
Besides, such beauty as adorned Esther and 
opened her way to fortune, is a gift bestowed on 
few ; but all may aspire after, and, through the 
grace of God, attain to the virtues of Ruth— 
virtues which raise many a straw-thatched cottage 
in true dignity above lordly mansions, and throw 
a moral glory around the humble head which 
poverty can neither eclipse nor obscure. Not that, 
dazzled by her beauty, I am insensible to the noble 
qualities of Esther, or deem her to have been 
unworthy of her brilliant fortunes. Unlike many 


RUIH THE VIRTUOUS. 215 


that, so soon as they rise in the world, forget the 
rock whence they were hewn, she, noble woman, 
perilled crown and life to save her people ; saying, 
as with pale resolution on her jewelled brow she 
passed uninvited into the presence of the king, “If 
I perish, I perish!” Still I regard Ruth’s history 
—though less sensational and fascinating to the 
mere lovers of romance—as more instructive, in 
this, that her virtues formed the foundations of 
her fortune. These, not the beauty that fascinates 
but fades, won the regard of Boaz, and were the 
steps in God’s providence by which the gleaner of 
his fields rose to be the wife of his bosom, and the 
mistress of his house. 

Nor won his regard only; for her virtues appear 
to have been the talk and admiration of all the 
town. Years before Naomi had returned to Beth- 
lehem, a spectacle to wonder at, her neighbors 
had seen her leave it in affluence. With a husband 
at her side, and at her back two gallant sons, she 
was an object of envy to many who, having no 
means to fly the famine, remained at home to 
suffer. But they who had envied, lived to pity her. 
Years thereafter, a rumor that Naomi has returned 
runs through the streets of Bethlehem; and the 
people hasten to their doors to see an instance, as 
sad as eyes could look on, of the hollowness of all 
earthly things. Slowly, feebly, downcast and for- 
lorn, her form bent under the weight of years, 
poverty hanging on her back, many sorrows 
written in her face, and the fountains of her great 
grief all opened anew by the painful recollections 
the seene awakens—Naomi goes up the street, 
leaning on the arm of another though younger 


216 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


widow. Old neighbors recognize her ; yet hardly 
believe their own eyes—their only salutation one 
of astonishment, and grief, and pity: “Is this 
Naomi?” As might be expected, and would 
certainly happen in any sniall town or village, 
an event so remarkable became the topic of uni- 
versal interest and conversation. Naomi’s for- 
tunes, with the name, relationship, character, and 
conduct of the stranger, her companion, were 
eagerly inquired into, and discussed. And all who 
know anything of the gossip of such places, will 
regard it as creditable to the people of Bethlehem, 
and avery high testimony to the virtues of Ruth, 
that, poor and a stranger, a daughter of Moab and 
of heathen descent, she came out of this ordeal like 
gold untarnished by the fire. The king's chaff ts 
better than other people's corn, says a proverb: and 
“the destruction of the poor,” says the wise man, 
“is their poverty.” But though according to these 
adages it usually depreciates merits which wealth 
and rank enhance, poverty cannot obscure Ruth’s 
remarkable virtues. Borrowing lustre from its 
depth as stars from the darkness of night, these 
rose on the town to attract universal notice and 
admiration: ‘‘All the city of my people,” said 
Boaz, ‘doth know that thou art a virtuous 
woman.” 

Observe, to begin with, one of her humblest 
virtues, Ruth’s zazdustry. 

She accompanies Naomi to the land of Israel ; 
but not to live on public charity, or to become the 
humble pensioner of affluent relatives. Reared in 
the lap of luxury, she has never learned to work; 
yet in a noble spirit of independence, she resolves 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 217 


to earn her bread with her own hands — and 
Naomi’s too. It is work, not charity, she asks. 
The bread of peggary, like that of infamy, she 
holds in scorn. Her ambition is to be able to hold 
up hands, once white and delicate, but now rough 
with honest labor, and say, as St. Paul did after- 
wards, ‘‘ These have ministered to my necessities.” 
Brave woman, let the world learn from thee that 
spirit of industry and of independence which is a 
Christian virtue, having the sanction of Him who 
said, ‘‘ My Father worketh hitherto, and I work ;” 
and not a virtue only, but the guardian of other 
virtues— preserving men from meanness and dis- 
honesty, and women from that love of idleness 
which makes many a poor, fallen, wretched crea- 
ture prefer the gains of infamy to the wages of 
honest labor. 

We have called this a humble virtue, not because 
we hold it cheap, or do not regret that under the 
debasing influence of our poor-laws and the self- 
indulgent spirit of the age, it is dying out of the 
land. One of the saddest phases of the times is, 
that, for themselves or their parents, thousands now 
accept and even clamor for public charity who, 
less than a century ago, would have scorned to 
touch it—the old spirit of our country, that of the 
Trojan who took his aged father on his back, and 
bore him on his shoulders through the burning 
city. We call it a humble virtue, because, notwith- 
standing the degeneracy of the age, it still dwells 
in many a lowly home; stamping those with a 
true nobility who feel the bread taste sweet their 
own hands have earned, and, looking forward with 
a Christian’s hope to the rest of heaven, are content 


218 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


here to live to work and work to live. Cheered by 
Ruth’s example, and sustained in patience by the 
grace of God, let the sons of honest toil work on. 
There is ‘rest for the weary.” The sweat of death 
is the last that shall gather on their brows. Let 
them wait. ‘Blessed,’ as was said to Daniel, “is 
he that waiteth ; therefore go thou thy way till the 
end be, for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at 
the end of the days.” 

Observe next her humility. 

On losing their fortune some retain in a silly 
pride what but aggravates the loss ; rankling like a 
thorn ina bleeding wound. An empty sack cannot 
stand erect ; yet they inflict misery on themselves, 
and not seldom wrong on others, by the mean and 
even dishonest things they do to keep up appear- 
ances. Deeming some honest but humble work 
beneath their dignity, they buy what they can- 
not pay for, or borrow what they cannot return. 
Ashamed to work, they are not ashamed to live on 
the fruits of others’ industry, rather than their own. 
There is something inexpressibly mean in this; 
and worse than mean. It argues a spirit of rebel- 
lion against Him and His providence who setteth 
up one and putteth down another ; the wickedness 
of Ajax’s heart, without the sublimity of his action, 
when, offended with the gods, he raised his broken 
sword and shook it against the heavens. How 
different from this unchristian and rebellious spirit 
the humility of Ruth? How beautiful it is! 
Willing to engage in any honest work, however 
humble, she bends like a reed to the blast; bows 
her gentle head meekly before the majesty of 
heaven; and, meeting her trials like a Christian 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 219 


heroine, drinks off the cup mingled and presented 
by her Father's hand. Her blessed frame and 
spirit His who said, ‘‘Not my will, but thine be 
done, O Father,” she wipes the tear from her eye, 
and suppressing each rising regret, goes forth to 
glean in fields till better work might offer, and 
better days should dawn. Nor when she went out 
to work, leaving the old saint at home to pray, 
were these far distant. The God and Husband of 
the widow had his eye on her, as he has on all who 
love and put their trust in Him; “for the needy 
shall not always be forgotten, and the expectation 
of the poor shall not perish forever.” Taking her 
by the hand, God leads her blindfold, as it were, 
to the field of Boaz ; by-and-by, as she opens her 
sparkling and grateful eyes on an unexpected for- 
tune, to find herself the wife of a mighty man of 
wealth, and mistress of the servants behind whom 
she had stooped to glean. Like some turtle dove 
that had left the neighboring wood, where it sat 
mourning for its mate, to drop with other feathered 
creatures on the stubble, ‘‘ her hap,” the story says, 
“‘was to light on a part of the field belonging to 
Boaz.” But as the old adage says, What haps God 
directs ; and from the fortune to which her humility 
conducted Ruth, we may learn to humble ourselves 
in the sight both of God and man. “Be clothed 
with humility,” is a good advice both for this world 
and the next. To stoop is the way to rise—our 
Saviour, in these words, laying down the law both 
of God’s natural and gracious government : ‘‘ Who- 
soever exalteth himself shall be humbled, and who- 
soever humbleth himself shall be exalted.” 
Observe her affection to Naomi, 


220 STUDIES OF CIIARACTER. 


Who shall reign? is a question that has given 
birth to intestine wars in houses as well as king- 
doms; nor has the point in dispute always been 
whether the house should resemble a beehive, 
where the sovereign is a queen, and not a king. 
Between those who stood in the same relationship 
as Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah, the love of power has 
bred unhappy quarrels ; and through that ambition, 
through conflicting interests, through incongruity 
of disposition or other causes, many a house has 
been divided against itself—not Christ, but the 
devil of an ill-temper, having ‘‘set the mother-in- 
law against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter- 
in-law against her mother-in-law.” And it speaks 
much for the wives of her sons, as well as for 
Naomi herself, that their home in the land of 
Moab was the abode of mutual and affectionate 
confidence. A prudent, kind, tender, pious matron, 
she had won not the respect only, nor the affection, 
but the warmest attachments of her daughters-in- 
law. One in heart, when death had desolated 
their home, and laid in the dust the support 
around which each had clung, like plants of wood- 
bine that the rude storm, tearing from their stays, 
has thrown on the ground, they intertwined their 
arms, and clung in close embraces to each other. 

How long the three widows mourned and wept, 
and mingled their griefs together, as they had 
once their joys, in the land of Moab, I know not; 
but the time came when its daughters must part 
from Moab, or from Naomi. She had fled to that 
godless land to escape the famine, and not in 
wrath but love. God had pursued her with a 
heavier judgment—her case that of ‘a man whe 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 221 


flees from a lion, and a bear meets him; or leans 
his hand on the wall, and a serpent bites him.” 
Those she sought to save by carnal policy snatched 
from her arms by the hand of death, she comes 
to see her error, and to bewail it ; and happy all 
those who, when earthly homes are desolated and 
fondly cherished hopes lie buried in the dust, are 
brought to seek better hopes and a better home! 
It was so with Naomi. In her affliction her heart 
turns away from Moab, back to the people and 
country of her God. She resolves to retrace her 
steps. Nor will Orpah and Ruth allow her to go 
alone. They will leave their kindred and country ; 
and paying a farewell visit to the graves of the 
dead, will share her fortunes. Each lending an 
arm, they will sustain her between them; and 
though unable to soothe her sorrows any more 
than their own, they will mingle their tears with 
hers. Naomi is not behind them in generosity. 
Burthened with a load of grief and years, her 
spirits sink with her strength under the fatigues 
of the way; or some dark cloud comes across 
her faith; any way her fortunes appearing as a 
sinking ship to remain in which is for her daugh- 
ters-in-law to perish, she persuades them to return. 
Perhaps she did so to try them—just as Jesus 
bade the man who seemed ready to follow him 
to sell all he had; or it was to warn them,—as in 
addressing his disciples, He foreboded persecution, 
and set the worst before them. 

Orpah’s courage fails. She loved Naomi, as 
many do Christ, but not better than herseli— 
not with a passion that is stronger than death. 
She kisses, and weeps; and yet she parts—re- 


222 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


minding us, as she goes and casts many a lingering 
look behind, of him who left Jesus, though sor- 
rowful ; drawn off by his great possessions. Not 
so Ruth. This was the crisis of her fate—that 
hour and moment of life on which her destiny 
shall turn; and such there is in every one’s life— 
coming to the lost on some occasion when they 
reject the offer of a Saviour, and to God’s chosen 
people at that happy, hallowed hour when, no 
longer halting between two opinions, they close 
with the offers of mercy. Moved no doubt by the 
Spirit of God, Ruth was equal to the crisis and 
the occasion. She stays when her sister leaves. 
Naomi advises, urges, entreats her also to go ; and 
calling in example to the aid of precept, points to 
the form of Orpah disappearing in the distance. 
It wrings Ruth’s heart to part with sister, mother, 
and country; but it would break it to part with 
Naomi. She cannot doit. So, passionately throw- 
ing herself into Naomi’s arms, or kneeling at her 
feet, and looking up with hands clasped and eyes 
brimful of tears, she breaks out into this touching, 
overpowering burst of affection—“ Entreat me not 
to leave thee, or to return from following after 
thee ; for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where 
thou lodgest, I will lodge ; thy people shall be my 
people, and thy God my God: where thou diest 
will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord 
do so to me, and more also, if ought but death 
part thee and me!” The ship may sink; but, 
nailing her colors to the mast, she will sink or 
swim with it. Death only shall part them: nor 
death —the last favor her lips shall ask, that 
they lay her in Naomi’s grave. 


RUTH THE VIRTUOUS. 223 


Nobly did Ruth redeem the pledges of this 
affecting scene. Not ashamed of Naomi’s poverty, 
lending her young arm to support her aged form, 
with her own hands earning her bread, cheering 
the lonely home, honoring the poor old saint as 
if she had been a queen, cherishing her as if she 
had been a lover, nursing her as if she were a 
helpless infant, living for her as if she was all 
the world to her, Ruth sets us an example of 
love and sympathy, of unselfish, devoted, generous 
affection, that, were it universal, with piety to God 
reigning in every house, would almost banish sorrow 
from the earth, and restore the days of Eden. 

She does more. She teaches us, by what she 
was to Naomi, what we are to be to Christ; how 
we should cleave to Him—how we should love 
Him—with what devotion of heart and body, of 
soul, strength, mind, and spirit, we should serve 
Him, and gladly spend and be spent for Him— 
saying, as we take up our cross to follow the lover 
and redeemer of our souls, ‘“‘Where thou goest, 
I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; 
thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall 
be my God.” Noblest and purest and truest of 
women, born of a heathen race, but more Christian 
than most Christians, and thyself a pledge of the 
coming of the Gentiles, monument of Divine grace 
and fair pattern of the most attractive piety, 
mother of the great and good, and ancestress of 
an incarnate God; well may we say, in taking 
leave of thee—MANY DAUGHTERS HAVE DONE 
VIRTUOUSLY, BUT THOU EXCELLEST THEM ALL! 


224 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Gideon the Deltberer. 


A VALLEY abandoned to solitude, however 
picturesque and beautiful, wears a melancholy 
air. Its loneliness and silence are so oppressive, 
as well as impressive, that we should be glad to 
hear a dog bark, or a cock crow, or in the blue 
smoke that wreaths up against gray crag or brown 
hill-side, see some sign of human life. The feel- 
ings, allied to sadness, such a scene produces, are 
deepened by the green spots we ever and anon 
light on, marked by nettles, a clump of decaying 
trees, and some crumbling ruins. These ruins 
were once happy homes ; children played on that 
daisy-sward ; gray patriarchs sat under the shadow 
of these aged trees; hospitable fires blazed on 
these cold hearths ; and from these roofless walls 
the voice of joy and gladness, of praise and prayer, 
echoed in other days. 

But the land of Israel, when Gideon was raised 
up to be its deliverer, presented a yet sadder 
aspect. The forests into which some, and the 
sheep-walks into which many, of our highland 
glens have been turned, are indications of national 
wealth—the fruits, legitimate or not, of long peace 
and great prosperity ; and to relieve, if not alto- 
gether change, the painful feelings a depopulated 
valley is apt to awaken, one has only to transport 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 225 


himself in imagination to the smiling homes amid 
the tangled forests and verdant prairies of America, 
where so many of our emigrants have exchanged 
perpetual poverty for the comforts of life. No 
such happy fortune, however, was the lot of the 
Israelites when their land became a scene of desola- 
tion; presenting an aspect sadder than roofless 
ruins and lonely sheep-walks. The houses were 
there, but no children played about the doors; 
the fields, but they bore no crops; the pastures, 
but they fed no cattle; the hills, but they bleated 
with no flocks of sheep; and the people also, but 
more unfortunate than our countrymen, whom 
other lands receive when their own casts them out, 
they possessed no homes but such as they found 
in caves, and dens, and mountain crags. To this 
extremity had the country been reduced by the 
invasions of the host of Midian. With occasional 
periods of relaxation, and exceptional cases such 
as Gideon’s, during seven long, weary years its 
wretched inhabitants had suffered—for disease 
always treads on the heels of want—the three- 
fold scourge of war, pestilence, and famine. 

It were difficult to imagine a more painful con- 
trast than that between the condition of Israel in 
these days and the prospects of their fathers on 
entering the land of Canaan. ‘‘ Blessed,” said 
Moses in his parting address to the tribes before 
they entered the promised land, “Blessed shalt 
thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in 
the field; blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, 
and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy 
cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of 
thy sheep: blessed shall be thy basket and thy 

15 


226 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


store ; blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, 
and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out. 
The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up 
against thee to be smitten before thy face; and 
the Lord shall command the blessings upon thee 
in all that thou settest thine hand unto.” What 
a shower of blessings—in the form of promises ! 
and if anything could have comforted the people 
for the loss of Moses, it was the prospect of enter- 
ing on such a splendid career of peace and pros- 
perity as this picture presented. Nothing more 
beautiful than the picture; but, alas! contrasted 
with the future sorrows and sufferings of the nation, 
apparently not more unsubstantial the visions of 
a dream—the brilliant arch that vanishes in the 
storm, whose dark cloud it spans. It seemed as 
if the people had ‘‘looked for peace, but no good 
came ; and for a time of health, and behold trouble.” 
No wonder, therefore, that when the angel appeared 
to Gideon by the oak at Ophrah, accosting him 
with these hopeful words, ‘“‘ The Lord is with thee, 
thou mighty man of valor,” his answer expressed 
the deepest disappointment. Looking around him 
on the desolation of his country, and at that 
moment in terror lest the Midianities should appear 
before he had got his corn threshed, and buried 
out of their sight ; no wonder that, in such melan- 
choly circumstances, he returned this melancholy 
reply, ‘‘O my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why 
then is all this befallen us ?—the Lord hath for- 
saken us, and delivered us into the hands of the 
Midianites.” 

But whatever reasons Gideon and his count y- 
men had to mourn, they had none to murmur or 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 227 


cast blame on God. He had not failed in one jot 
or tittle of all he spake to their fathers by the lips 
of Moses ; nor did their deserted homesteads, and 
ravaged fields, and empty stalls, and silent hills, 
belong to those mysteries of Providence it baffles 
the wisest to solve. 

First, as to the question, ‘If the Lord be with 
us, why hath this befallen us?” that was easily 
answered. It finds a solution—a clear, sufficient 
answer—in the words with which Moses prefaced 
his series of beatitudes, the nail on which that 
string of pearls was suspended—“ All these bless- 
ings,” he said, ‘‘shall come on thee and overtake 
thee, zf thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord 
thy God.” They had not done so; nor was proof 
of that far to seek. It rose there, near by the 
threshing-floor, insulting God, in an altar erected 
to the worship of Baal, though the Lord had com- 
manded them, saying, ‘“‘ Thou shalt have no other 
gods before me.” 

Secondly, as to Gideon’s complaint, “‘ The Lord 
hath forsaken us,” their trials proved the contrary. 
They are bastards, not sons, that grow up without 
chastisement—they are common, not precious 
stones, that escape the lapidary’s wheel—they are 
wild, not garden trees, that never bleed beneath 
the pruning-knife. ‘‘ Whom God loveth,” says the 
Apostle, ‘“‘He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son 
that He receiveth.” Others, I may remark, besides 
Gideon, but with less reason or excuse, have 
fallen into his mistake. Nor when blow succeeds 
blow, and trials, like foaming waves, break on the 
back of trials, and we look on them through the 
dim ind distorting medium of our tears, is the 


228 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


complaint unnatural, ‘The Lord hath forgotten 
me, my Lord hath forsaken me.” Nevertheless it 
is a mistake, and a great mistake—a feeling that 
should be resisted by the people of God, since it 
tends to defeat his gracious purpose, and aggravate 
_ instead of alleviating the sufferings by which he 
seeks to sanctify, and draw them more closely to 
himself. God has no other object than these in 
afflicting his children; nor is it possible for fancy 
to imagine anything more touching, or tender, than 
the manner in which, as one hurt by their unworthy 
suspicions, He replies, ‘Can a mother forget her 
sucking child, that she should not have compassion 
on the fruit of her womb? She may forget: yet 
will not I forget thee. I have graven thee on the 
palms of my hands, and thy walls are continually 
before me !” 

To prepare the ground for sowing, the husband- 
man, if I may say so, affiicts it—he drives a plough- 
share through its bosom, and tears asunder its 
clods with iron teeth. Similar was the purpose for 
which God afflicted Israel by the hand of Midian. 
That object accomplished, as the sower follows 
the ploughman to cast seed into the furrows his 
share has drawn, God sent a prophet to preach to 
his people. With a rock for his pulpit, with re- 
pentance for his text, and for his church some 
mountain hollow, where ghastly crowds, creeping 
from their caves, assembled to hear him, this 
preacher set forth their sins as the cause of their 
sorrows ; calling them to repentance. Nor, such 
a forerunner of Gideon as John Baptist was of 
Christ, did he call in vain. Tears course down 
the furrows of famished cheeks. The voice of 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 229 


suffering ascends to heaven sanctified by the voice 
of sorrow ; confessions of penitence mingle with 
groans of pain; the caves and dens they had 
turned into dwellings, they turn into oratories ; 
and now another ear than the rocks hears their 
prayers—the cry, ‘‘ How long, O Lord, how long?” 
The set time is come. Past that darkest hour 
which precedes the dawn. Heaven’s gate is thrown 
open; and an angel leaving it, cleaves his way 
earthward to raise up in Gideon one who should 
break the yoke of Midian, and rise the Deliverer of 
the oppressed. 

Such was the order of God’s government and 
dealings then ; and such, it is important to observe, 
it is still. The people of Israel were to be relieved 
of their sorrows, but not till they had repented of 
their sins. Penitence must precede peace. Sins 
not repented of are sins not forgiven: and since 
true joy is as certainly born of godly sorrow as 
bright days of gray mornings, or rather day itself 
of the dark womb of night, they, therefore, who 
fancy themselves forgiven the sins which they have 
never sorrowed for, only deceive themselves—say- 
ing, ‘‘Peace, peace!—when no peace is to be 
found.” 

The story of Gideon is written for our instruc- 
tion. Nor will it have been written in vain if, seek- 
ing to obtain deliverance from the bondage of sin 
and, to use Paul’s words, “‘ work out our salvation,” 
we take him asa pattern. Copying and cultivating 
the qualities which contributed so materially to 
his success, let tis enter on our own battles in the 
spirit of his famous cry, ‘‘The sword of the Lord 
and Gideon!” Assuming that my readers know 


230 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the details of the history, and the remarkable way 
in which he delivered Israel, I observe— 

Gideon teaches us to be humble, and self-dis- 
trustful. 

In his history the curtain rises on a scené of 
obscure and humble life—a threshing-floor, in 
some sequestered nook, where we see a man, to 
beat out the grain, driving bullocks round and 
round over some corn, It has happily escaped 
the pillage of the Midianites, and he intends to 
conceal it in the ground for further safety. This 
countryman is Gideon—the future deliverer and 
judge of Israel; and that his humble task. Fired 
with ambition, it might have been natural for him 
to leave such obscure employments to others ; and, 
panting to deliver his country and also distinguish 
himself, aim at something better suited to his. 
talents and position. ‘‘ What manner of men were 
they whom ye slew at Tabor?” was his question 
to the conquered and captive kings, Zebah and 
Zalmunna. “As thou art, so were they ; each one 
resembled the children of a king,” was their answer. 
Now this answer, though fatal to themselves (for 
their victims were Gideon’s brethren), presents his 
case as one of those where the body seems to take 
form from the mind it lodges, and to reveal, bya 
certain nobleness of bearing and expression, the 
greatness of the soul within. Yet Gideon, though 
belonging, if we may judge from this, to the order 
of Nature’s nobility, abandoned himself to no 
dreams of ambition; but was called of God from: 
the quiet, diligent, and contented discharge of the 
humblest duties, to honors and usefulness he never 
dreamed of. If God should call him to a higher 


GIDEON THE DEI.IVERER. 231 


place, well; if not, also well. In this combination 
of a humble disposition and a brilliant destiny, 
Gideon was by no means singular. He is one of 
a constellation of men who have emerged from 
obscurity and the contented discharge of humble 
offices to shine as stars. Christ’s call, for example, 
found Matthew at the receipt of custom; Simon 
and Andrew, James and John, mending their nets 
on the shores of Galilee. Moses got his call when 
discharging the duties of a shepherd in the land of 
Midian; and David his, when, a dutiful son, he 
herded his father’s flocks on the hills of Bethlehem. 
It is the busy, not the idle, not such as are dis- 
satisfied, but contented with their lot, and do its 
duties well, whom God usually calls to posts of 
honor and of distinguished usefulness. 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit "—the astonishing 
exclamation with which our Lord opened His 
Sermon on the Mount, and at once took his hearers 
captive—finds no more appropriate illustration 
than Gideon offers. ‘‘ The Lord be with thee, thou 
mighty man of valor”—the words with which the 
heavenly messenger first accosted him—had fallen 
on a self-confident and ambitious spirit like a spark 
on a train of gunpowder—setting it in a blaze, 
firing it instantly up. And had such been Gideon’s 
temper, to the call, “‘Go in this thy might, and 
thou shalt save Israel ; have not I sent thee ?” how 
had he leapt up; and, casting away the ox-goad 
to draw the sword, with the blare of trumpet sum- 
moned his country to arms? But, a humble, 
modest, self-distrustful man, he is overwhelmed 
with the magnitude of the task. Measuring it and 
himself, the difference is such that he deems it 


232 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


hopeless ; and eager to escape from an enterprise 
in which he can anticipate nothing but certain 
failure, he cries, “‘O, my Lord, wherewith shall 1 
save Israel? Behold, my family is poor in Ma- 
nasseh ; and I am the least in my father’s house !” 
Few have so thrust office and honor away. Nor 
does he venture to accept them till assured by a 
miracle that his call is from heaven—till he sees 
fire flash from the cold rock, and the angel, at 
whose touch it came, leap on the altar, and ascend 
to heaven in its flames. 

History offers many remarkable parallels; but 
none perhaps more remarkable than that between 
the self-distrust and diffidence of Moses and the 
self-distrust and diffidence of Gideon. In this they 
present a remarkable and instructive contrast to 
the ready confidence with which the disciples of 
our Lord—by nature very inferior men—responded 
to His call. It was from no aversion to the work 
that both Moses the leader, and Gideon the de- 
liverer, of Israel shrunk from it ; but from the very 
humble estimate they had formed of their own 
powers. The disciples seem to have been troubled 
with no such scruples; but the contrary. Their 
mutual jealousies and unseemly strifes for pre- 
cedence argued a self-sufficient spirit. So strong 
was this in Simon that swelling waves and roaring 
storm were not formidable enough to deter him 
from an attempt to rival his Master, and also walk 
upon the sea—in Thomas, that when Jesus by 
repairing to Bethany was to put his life in jeopardy, 
troubled with no misgiving, he said, “‘ Let us go 
also and die with him”—in the whole band, that 
amid the dangers of that ever-memorabie night in 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 233 


which our Lord was betrayed, they made profes- 
sions heroic and brave as Peter’s, declaring, ‘“‘ We 
will die with thee rather than deny thee !” 

But the contrast between the spirit and temper 
in which Moses and Gideon on the one hand, and 
the disciples on the other, entered on their re- 
spective vocations, is not more remarkable than 
that between the manner in which they filled them. 
With Moses returning to the court of Pharaoh, to 
beard the haughty tyrant, where he sits armed 
with imperial power, and surrounded by those that 
obey his nod, compare Simon Peter, cowering 
before a woman’s eye, and skulking away from 
observation, and her questions, into the darkness of 
the night. With Gideon advancing at the head of 
a handful of men against the whole host of Midian, 
or hanging in pursuit on their flying columns, 
compare the disciples as, struck with terror, they 
scatter, and fly from the garden where they have 
left their Master a prisoner in the hands of his 
cruel enemies. From these cases how should we 
learn that our strength lies in our weakness—in our 
sense of it—in what fosters that frame of mind 
which Paul expressed by this remarkable paradox, 
“When I am weak, then am I strong.” The self- 
distrust which cries to God for help, and works out 
salvation with fear and trembling ; which, casting 
away all confidence in an arm of flesh, clings to the 
arm of Jesus; which says with Moses, ‘“ Unless 
thou go with us, let us not go up,” and with Jacob, 
““T will not let thee go unless thou bless me ;” like 
the army which, drawn out in battle array, was seen 
to first fall on its knees in praver,—this is the sure 
presage, not of defeat, but of victory. In the self- 


234 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


distrust which prompts to prayer, and makes a man 
cast himself on God, and substitute for human 
weakness the power of a Divine omnipotence, we 
may say as Samson did of his unshorn locks, “In 
that our great strength lies.” 

Gideon teaches us the importance of having our 
faith strengthened. 

Any means Gideon possessed for accomplishing 
the work he had undertaken, were, humanly speak- 
ing, altogether inadequate. He had not a chance 
of success, if it could be said with truth, “ There is 
no hope for him in God.” Faith being then, as 
faith is still, the medium of connection between 
human weakness and Divine power, it was his 
mainstay. He was thrown entirely on its strength. 
The ship does not ride the storm otherwise than 
by the hold her anchor takes of the solid ground. 
By that, which lies in the calm depths below, as 
little moved by the waves that swell, and roll, and 
foam above, as by the winds that lash them into 
fury, she resists the gale, and rides the billows of 
the stormiest sea. But her safety depends on 
something else also. When masts are struck and 
sails are furled, and, anchored off reef or rocky 
shore, she is laboring in the wild tumult for her 
life, it likewise lies in the strength of her cable and 
of the iron arms that grasp the solid ground. By 
these she hangs to it; and thus not only the firm 
earth, but their strength also is her security. Let 
the flukes of the anchor, or strands of the cable 
snap, and her fate is sealed. Nothing can avert it. 
Powerless to resist, and swept forward by the sea, 
she drives on ruin; and hurled against an iron 
shore, her timbers are crushed to pieces like a 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 235 


shell. And what anchor and cable are to her, the 
faith, by which man makes God's strength his own, 
was to Gideon; and is still to believers in their 
times of trial. 

Aware of that, and teaching us by his example 
a lesson of the highest practical importance, Gideon 
prepared for his enterprise by seeking to have his 
faith strengthened ; deeming that of such transcen- 
dent consequenceas to ask,what God kindly granted, 
a miracle—ay, two miracles !—tostrengthenit. The 
time was coming to him—as probably in sore tempt- 
ations and heavy trials, and certainly in the awful 
hour of death, it shall come to us—when he would 
have to stand face to face with difficulties no mere 
human energy could overcome, and dangers no 
mere human fortitude could meet. There could be 
no help for him then in man; and should his faith 
fail, there was none in God. Before the terrible 
figure of the giant, and in other such circumstances, 
David said, ‘“‘I will remember the years of the right 
nand of the Most High;” and so, to feed his 
courage from a similar source, Gideon wished for 
something to remember, and to rest on, as proving 
that God was with him of a truth—something to 
shine like a star when the night was at the darkest 
—something to feel like a rock below his feet when 
the flood was highest. 

For that purpose, casting himself on the kindness 
and compassion of God, he spreads out a fleece on 
the floor, saying, “If thou wilt save Israel by mine 
hand, let there be dew on the fleece only; but let 
it be dry on all the earth beside.” It fell out as he 
wished. With foot that leaves no trace, or trail, 
upon the grass, he goes next morning to examine 


236 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the fleece ; and there it lies all glistening with thz 
dews of night, to yield to his hands, as they wring 
it out, a bowlful of water. Peter only needed 
Christ to say, ‘‘Come,” and, without a thought, or 
moment’s hesitation, he sprang from the boat out 
on the sea. In Gideon’s circumstances he would 
have at once dropped the fleece to draw the sword, 
and rush down on the hosts that lay in the valley 
of Israel like grasshoppers for multitude. Not so 
Gideon. Perhaps by nature one of those who, 
like the granite. that is ill to work, but is long to 
wear, though tenacious of their purpose when it is 
formed, are slow to form it, he is not yet satisfied. 
He has heard how much both Abraham and Moses, 
in their days, ventured to request of God. He 
also will venture, and ask another miracle. Here 
it is—‘‘Let not thine anger be hot against me,” 
he says, “I will speak but this once: let it 
now be dry only on the fleece, and on all the 
ground let there be dew.” Of the two this would 
be the most obvious miracle—wool being more ready 
than almost anything else to show signs of dew, 
as we have observed in beads standing thick on the 
tufts that furze or thorn had plucked from the 
passing flock, when grass and ground seemed dry. 
The request—not on Gideon’s part one of pre- 
sumption, but of self-distrust—is granted : and now 
he can say with David, and many else, ‘“ Thy 
gentleness has made me great.” Next morning 
sees the whole earth “sown with orient pearl :” 
liquid diamonds top the spikes of grass, and hang 
sparkling in the sunbeams on every bush, as 
Gideon, with feet bathed at each step in dew, 
draws near the fleece. He sees it: and has no 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 23) 


more anxiety. No bead glistens on its surface ; 
nor drop of water falls into the bowl, as, to make 
assurance doubly sure, he wrings the fleece in his 
hands. Now, he is all faith. He has no further 
doubts. Recollecting the miracles of the fleece, he 
looks unmoved on the swarms of Midian ; unmoved, 
sees his army of more than thirty thousand men by 
coward flight diminished to one-third their number ; 
unmoved, sees the ten thousand, like a snow-wreath 
on which winds have blown and the sun has beaten, 
reduced to three hundred men. At the head of so 
small a band, and with no other instruments of 
assault but a lamp, and pitcher, and empty trum- 
pet, he stands confident and ready. The fleece is 
his battle banner. In the faith it has strengthened, 
if not created, he steals down in the darkness on 
the sleeping camp. On a sudden—to have them 
answered by three hundred more—he flashes his 
light and blows his trumpet, and with his battle 
cry, ‘‘ The sword of the Lord and Gideon !” adds 
to the confusion and carnage of a scene, where the 
Midianites, seized with a sudden panic, bury their 
swords in each other’s bosoms. 

He had a great work to do. But so has every 
Christian. With such temptations, perhaps, before 
us as have proved formidable, if not fatal, to the 
greatest saints ; with trials to encounter that have 
wrung complaints from pious lips; with probably 
great fights of affliction to endure ; with death and 
its gloomy terrors certainly to face—we shali need 
all the faith that pains and prayer can provide. 
The righteous scarcely are saved: many of them 
entering the harbor as a vessel that, with masts 
sprung, and sails torn to ribbons, and _ bulwarks 


238 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


gone by the board, bears marks of storm, and 
danger, and a sore battle for life. Paul himself 
trembled lest he should be a castaway ; and in view 
of our trials, we should labor, according to his 
advice, to make our calling and election sure ; to 
have the witness of God’s Spirit with our own that 
we have been born again, and have certainly passed 
from death to life. By communion with God, let 
us seek to get our faith so strengthened, that its 
trials may prove its most signal triumphs: and, our 
spiritual vision. growing clearer as our dying eye 
grows darker, a better world rising to view as this 
fades from the sight, glory opening over our heads 
aS a grave opens beneath our feet, the voice of 
angels falling on our ear as it grows dull and duller 
to all earthly sounds, they who bend over us to 
catch life’s last low whisper may hear us saying, 
“My heart and my flesh faint and fail ; but God is 
the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever- 
more.” 

Gideon teaches us to make thorough work of 
what belongs to our deliverance from sin. 

In closing the account of what God did for him, 
and through him for his people, the historian says, 
““Thus was Midian subdued before the children of 
Israel, so that they lifted up their heads no more.” 
And how was this accomplished? The remarka- 
able victory God wrought for Gideon, without any 
effort on his part, may be regarded as a type of that 
greater, better victory which, without any effort on 
ours, God’s Son wrought for us, when he took our 
nature and our sins upon him—dying, the just for 
the unjust, that we might be saved. Gideon fol- 
lowed up this victory by calling all possible re- 


GIDEON THE DELIVERER. 236 


sources to his aid. He summoned the whole 
country to arms, as, accompanied by his famous 
three hundred men, he hung on the skirts of the 
broken host, and with sword bathed in their blood 
cut down the fugitives—kings, princes, captains, 
and common soldiers, with an eye that knew no 
pity, and a hand that did not spare. Now it is 
to work as thorough, and against enemies more 
formidable, that He who trode the winepress alone, 
redeeming us to God by his blood, calls all his 
followers. He has achieved a victory as triumph- 
ant; and now an extermination of our sins as 
thorough as that of Midian is the work that should 
engage our utmost efforts and inspire all our 
prayers. Jesus, and He alone, has won the victory 
and purchased our salvation; but honored to be 
fellow-laborers with Him and God, we are called 
to work it out. By resolute self-denial, by con- 
stant watchfulness, by earnest prayer, by the dili- 
gent use of every means of grace, and above all by 
the help of the Holy Spirit, we are to labor to 
cast sin out of our hearts—crucifying it—killing it 
—thrusting it through and through with the sword 
of the Spirit, which is the word of God, till its 
power is broken; and there is no more life in it ; 
and it becomes hideous and hateful as a rotting 
corpse ; and it can be said of the sins that were 
once our cruel masters and oppressors, They lift 
up their heads no more. 

This is no easy work. But heaven is not to be 
reached by easy-going people. Like a beleaguered 
city, where men scale the walls and swarm in at 
the deadly breach, the violent take it by force. 
The rest it offers is for the weary. The crowns it 


240 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


confers are for warriors’ brows. Its rewards are 
bestowed on such as, cutting off a right hand or 
plucking out a right eye to cast it away, deem it 
profitable that one of their members should perish, 
than that their whole body should be cast into hell 
fire. Nor was Gideon’s easy work. His limbs were 
weary running ; his hand was weary slaying ; and 
the way was long and the sun high and hot, when 
he arrived with his three hundred followers, panting 
and exhausted, at Jordan’s shore. To sit down? 
No. It had been sweet to lie on its green banks, 
and, lulled to sleep by the song of birds and 
murmur of the stream, rest under its cool shades 
awhile ; but, bent on their purpose, they dashed 
right into the waters, and, stemming the flood, 
passed over, ‘‘he and the three hundred men, faint 
yet pursuing.” ‘‘ Faint, yet pursuing,” be that our 
chosen motto. Till we are dead to sin, and sin is 
dead to us, be it our daily work to crucify the flesh 
with its affections and lusts ; and while asking that 
the God of hope would give us all joy and peace in 
believing, be the prayer we daily offer for ourselves 
that of St. Paul for his Thessalonian converts, 
“THE VERY GOD OF PEACE SANCTIFY YOU 
WHOLLY.” 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 241 


Hannay the Matron. 


ON entering a Roman Catholic church in many 
of the large cities of France or Italy, there is much 
to impress the mind of a spectator not accustomed 
to such imposing scenes. There is the vastness 
and magnificence of the edifice, with its ‘‘dim 
religious light ;” the gorgeous dresses of the 
priests, and highly dramatic character of the ser- 
vices; the clouds of fragrant incense ; altars illu- 
minated with candles, and blazing with gold and 
jewels ; the apparent devoutness of the worshippers, 
all on their knees with heads bent reverently to the 
ground, or eyes intently fixed on one who, with 
many a strange, mysterious sign, is changing—as 
they believe—bread into the flesh, and the blood of 
the grape into the blood of an incarnate God ; and 
there is the grandeur of the music that swells and 
rolls till it seems to shake the walls of the mighty 
fabric, amid whose lofty arches it is heard dying 
away, like the echo of angels’ songs. But when he 
has recovered from his first surprise, and ‘begins to 
look around him with calm composure, there is 
nothing there which strikes an intelligent and 
thoughtful Protestant more than the remarkable 
disproportion between the men and women among 
the worshippers. For one man telling his beads in 
front of a shrine, or kneeling before an image, or 

16 


“qZ STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


muttering his confession in the ear of a priest, or 
adoring the host, or thrusting out his tongue to 
receive the wafer, or engaged in any other ceremo- 
nial, there are at least twenty women. It is not 
that the proportion of women is twenty, or ten 
times larger in these countries than in our own; 
nor that the men there have not sins to be pardoned 
and souls to be saved, and know it too. It is not 
that the men are all atheists, and say, “‘ There is no 
God ;” nor even all confirmed sceptics, who, cor- 
rupted by Voltaire and others, have made up their 
minds to reject Christianity, and regard the Bible 
as ‘‘a cunningly devised fable.” The striking pre- 
ponderance of the one sex over the other in these 
Popish, as compared with our Protestant, churches 
is to be sought in other causes. It is mainly due to 
the pretensions of a church which, arrogantly claim- 
ing not only to be the mistress of the empires of the 
world, but of its mind, has everywhere proved itself 
the tool of tyrants, and an enemy to the liberties 
of mankind—to the monstrous frauds she practises 
on the credulity of her devotees—to the childish 
mummeries of her worship—to the pride and ambi- 
tion, to the avarice, the rapacity, the sensuality, 
an? the vices which once characterized, and, where 
Opportunity permits, in many instances still charac- 
terize, her clergy. How gross their lives and habits 
were is a matter of history; nor did Luther, or 
Knox, or any of the Reformers ever draw a darker 
picture of them than some found, not in the pages 
merely of Roman Catholic historians, but in the 
records of their own Ecclesiastical Councils. For 
example, the sixty-eight canons enacted at a 
General Provincial Council which met at Edinburgh, 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 243 


in the church of the Blackfriars, on the 27th Nov., 
1549—eleven years before the era of the Reforma- 
tion in Scotland—and which, under the presidency 
of Archbishop Hamilton, of St. Andrews, was 
attended by many prelates and distinguished mem- 
bers of the Church, are prefaced by a confession 
that the troubles and heresies which afflicted the 
Church were due to the corruption, the profane 
lewdness, and the gross ignorance of churchmen of 
almost all ranks. The clergy, therefore, were en- 
joined to put away their concubines under pain of 
deprivation of their benefices ; to dismiss from their 
houses the children born to them in concubinage ; 
not to promote such children to benefices, nor to 
enrich them, the daughters, with dowries, the sons 
with baronies, from the patrimony of the Church. 
Prelates were admonished not to keep in their 
households manifest drunkards, gamblers, whore- 
mongers, brawlers, night-walkers, buffoons, blasphe- 
mers, profane swearers ; and the clergy in general 
were exhorted to amend their lives and manners. 
Such were the fruits of Popery where it had room 
and freedom to develop itself; and in these days, 
when short-sighted statesmen are proposing to re- 
establish and endow it, it is well to remember how 
the crimes of its clergy and the nature of its 
claims have made religion in many countries an 
object of indifference or of contempt to educated 
men; to almost all who make any pretensions to 
intelligence, or to freedom and independence of 
thought, 

What has happened in these lands on a great 
scale has happened in our own on a small one. 
With us infidels have taken occasion from the 


244 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


crimes into which its ministers and followers have 
fallen to disparage religion, and sneer at piety. 
They have not scrupled to ransack the pages of the 
Bible to find matter for casting doubts on its Divine 
authority ; seeking in the sins of Noah, of Abraham, 
~of Jacob, of David, and other saintly but fallible men, 
weapons wherewith to stab Christianity, and make 
hers the unhappy fate of the eagle which fell pierced 
by an arrow feathered from her own wing. This is 
unfair. For what good cause, as well as religion, 
has not been betrayed by some, and dishonored by 
others? To raise an argument or a sneer against 
our holy faith on the crimes either of its professors 
or of its ministers, were not so, if, like Hindooism or 
other forms of paganism, it either lent these crimes 
its sanction, or had any tendency to produce them. 
But its tendency is the very opposite. The Bible, 
instead of sanctioning, strongly condemns the very 
sins it records—condemns them in all, but especi- 
ally in the professors of religion. It is therefore 
impossible to conceive anything more unfair and 
illogical than to make the crimes of Christians a 
reason for doubting, or denying the truth of their 
faith. But the carnal mind being enmity against 
God, however unreasonable, it is not unnatural for 
men thus to abuse the apothegm, “The tree is 
known by its fruit.” And how careful, therefore, 
should the ministers of religion, and indeed all God’s 
people, be of their walk and conversation, of their 
life and manners! how should they take heed lest 
their sins, even their failings and inconsistencies, 
afford occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blas- 
pheme, or cast a stumbling-block in the way of 
Christ’s weakest followers! ‘‘ Whosoever,” He has 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 245 


said, “shall offend one of these little ones which 
believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone 
were hanged about his neck, and that he were 
drowned in the depths of the sea.” 

These reflections are suggested by the low con- 
dition to which the crimes of the priesthood had 
brought religion in Israel at the time when Hannah 
first appears upon the stage. The mother ofa dis- 
tinguished man who was to introduce better days, 
her own lot had fallen on evil ones—in that darkest 
hour which precedesthe dawn. The aged Eli, whose 
pitiful and tragic fate is one of the most touching 
incidents in the Bible, was then both the high-priest 
and judge, or civil ruler, of Israel. Presenting in his 
family one of the most melancholy examples of the 
truth that, though talents often are, grace is not 
hereditary, this good man had, in Hophni and Phi- 
nehas, two remarkably depraved sons. They were 
his colleagues and assistants in the priestly office. 
Taking advantage of their position to gratify pas- 
sions which a too-indulgent father had allowed to 
grow up unchecked, they were guilty of the most 
atrocious crimes. They tyrannized over the people, 
trampling them under foot. Ministers of religion, 
none violated its precepts so flagrantly as they. No 
crime was too great for them to commit, nor place 
too sacred for them to profane. Neither man’s pro- 
perty nor woman’s virtue was safe in their hands. 
The scribes and Pharisees, those hypocriteson whose 
‘heads John Baptist and our Lord launched their 
loudest thunders, were not so guilty as they. Christ 
charged them with turning his Father’s house into 
“a den of thieves ;” but Elis sons turned it to a 
fouler purpose. Regardless even of appearances, 


246 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


tney took no trouble to whiten the sepulchre, but 
committed within the sacred precincts of the temple 
such outrages on morality as are without a parallel, 
unless in the darkest days of Popery—that age of 
immoral popes, and priests, and monks, and nuns, 
which preceded and did much to produce the Refor- 
mation. The time was one for judgment to begin 
at the house of God, for an Ezekiel to rise up and 
cry aloud, saying, ‘‘ Thus saith the Lord God unto 
the shepherds, Woe be to the shepherds of Israel, 
that dofeed themselves! Should not the shepherds 
feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you 
with the wool: ye kill them that are fed, but ye 
feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not 
strengthened, neither have ye healed that which 
was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was 
broken, neither have ye brought again that which 
was drawn away, neither have ye sought that which 
was lost: but with force and with cruelty have ye 
ruled over them ; and they were scattered because 
there was no shepherd ; and they became meat to 
all the beasts of the field where they were scattered ; 
and none did search or seek after them. Behold I 
am against the shepherds, and I will require my 
flock at their hands.” 

Such were they who served the altar in Hannah’s 
time ; and the result was the same as the world has 
seen in after times. Outraged and disgraced by 
the crimes of its ministers, religion sank into public 
contempt, and, almost mortally ‘“ wounded in the 
house of its friends,” seemed ready to expire. With 
the interests of virtue betrayed by their appointed 
guardians; with those who should have set the 
best, setting the worst example ; with consecrated - 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 247 


priests taking advantage of their position to grow 
rich by sacrilege, and debauch the wives and 
daughters of the community ; what else was to 
be expected than such results as may be seen 
in Italy, in France, and in other popish coun- 
tries? At first indignant, and in the end demo- 
ralized, the people deserted the house of God, and 
abandoned the profession of a religion which the 
crimes of its priests had made to stink in their nos- 
trils: ‘“‘ Wherefore,” alluding to Hophni and Phine- 
has, it is said, ‘‘ Wherefore the sin of the young men 
was great before the Lord, for men adhorred the 
offering of the Lord.” 

But even in those days God did not leave himself 
without awitness. There were some who felt that 
his, like other good causes, has never more need of 
support than when it is betrayed, or disgraced by 
its supporters. To thecry, “‘ Another man to bear 
the colors !” it is a brave thing to step forward, and, 
plucking them from a dead hand, to raise them up 
and bear them on ; but it is a still nobler and braver 
thing to join the broken band who, refusing to flee, 
rally around the standard that traitors or cowards 
have abandoned. Such an act closed the life of 
Colonel Gardiner, the grand old Christian soldier, 
who, deserted by his own regiment on the fatal field 
of Prestonpans, and seeing a handful of men with- 
out an officer bravely maintaining the fight, spurred 
his horse through a shower of bullets to place him- 
self at their head, and fall a sacrifice to truth and 
loyalty. Such an act also was the women’s 
who openly followed our Lord with tears when 
no disciple had the courage to show his face 
in the streets—when they by their desertion had 


248 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


covered Christ’s cause with shame, and his ene- 
mies, in cruel mockery, had crowned his head with 
thorns. 

We cannot perhaps apply to the father of Samuel 
and husband of Hannah the saying, “ Faithful 
among the faithless only he ;” yet to Elkanah cer- 
tainly belongs the honor of resisting the current 
of popular opinion, and, in an age of all but uni- 
versal defection, clinging to the cause and the house 
of God. When its ministers had brought dishonor 
on the service of God, and their crimes had made 
the people abhor it, he felt that there was the more 
need for him to stand by it. He was not the man 
to desert the ship. Resolved, to use the words ofa 
brave seaman, to stick by her so long as two planks 
held together, and perish rather than survive her 
loss, he clung bravely to the wreck. Praying, ex- 
pecting, waiting for better times, this devout and 
devoted man maintained the practice of religion ; 
and, with few to keep him in countenance, repaired 
year by year, according to the statutes of the Lord, 
to His house in Shiloh. In this, acting a part as 
consonant to sound reason as to the precepts of 
religion, he sets an example which no Christian can 
fail to admire—such as no one who falls on evil 
times or happens to be thrown into evil company, 
should fail to imitate. 

Standing on the shore of an estuary, one sees a 
boat riding in the tideway, when sea-weed and 
other things float by, over the self-same spot ; and 
whether the tide ebbs or flows, whether it steals 
quietly in or comes on with the rush and roar of 
foaming billows, the boat always boldly shows its 
face to it; and turning its head to the current re- 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 249 


ceives onits bows, to split them, the shock of waves. 
This, which to a child would seem strange, is due 
to the anchor that lies below the waters, and, grasp- 
ing the solid ground with its iron arms, holds fast 
the boat. It seems no less wonderful to see a tree 
—no sturdy oak, but slender birch, or trembling 
aspen—standing erect away up on a mountain brow; 
where, exposed to the sweep of every storm, it has 
gallantly maintained its ground against the tem- 
pests that have laid in the dust the stateliest orna- 
ments of the plain. But our wonder ceases so soon 
as we climb the height, and see wherein its great 
strength lies ; how it has struck its roots down into 
the mountain, and wrapped them with many a 
strong twist and turn round and round the rock. 
Such an anchor, and rock, and stay, Elkanah had 
in God. To divine grace, his steadfastness to duty 
against the popular influence and amid almost uni- 
versal defection was mainly due. Yet I cannot 
doubt, nor, knowing what in trying times husbands 
have owed to brave and pious wives, would I doubt 
though I could, that in the bold and faithful part 
he acted, Elkanah owed much to her whose name 
gives a title to our chapter. 

Both before and since the days when they minis- 
tered to our Lord, and, following him to Calvary 
with their tears, were the last at the cross and the 
frst at the sepulchre, the Church has exhibited 
many instances of high and holy heroism on the 
part of women. However deserving of the name in 
ordinary circumstances, where martyrs’ fires were 
fiercely burning, and scaffolds flowed with blood, 
and prisons overflowed with captives, women have 
not showed themselves to be the ‘‘ weaker sex,” 


250 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


On the contrary, when adherence to principle in- 
volved painful sacrifice, men have found such sup- 
port in gentle women as I have seen the green and 
pliant ivy lend the wall it clothed and clung to, 
when that, undermined or shaken, was ready to 
fall. Daughters of Eve, but no tools of the tempter 
to seduce, with a babe at their breast and others at 
their knee, they have encouraged men to withstand 
temptation, and boldly face the storm, counting 
rank, home, living, and all things else, but loss for 
Christ. Such was the spirit of Hannah. 

Some good men have been sorely tried by god- 
less wives. Of Solomon; who presents a signal 
illustration of the saying of an old Scotch judge, 
“That you can never determine a man’s sanity 
either by the wife he marries or by the religion he 
adopts,” it is said ‘‘ his wives turned away his heart 
after other gods.” Happier than Solomon and 
many else, Elkanah was not one of whom it could 
be said, ‘‘A man’s enemies shall be those of his 
own house.” At least, so far as concerned Hannah, 
his was not a house divided against itself. Enter- 
ing with sympathy into all his plans and works of 
piety, inflaming his zeal, and confirming him in his 
resolution, though he should stand alone, to stand 
by the cause of God, she was worthy the name of 
“helpmeet.” Blessed woman, and “mother in 
Israel,” we would set her forth as a model for wives, 
and mothers, and all, to imitate. 


HER PATIENCE. 


“There is a skeleton in every house!” This, 
though a trite, is a true saying, and trite because it 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 25! 


is true. The grim monitor that stands in every 
house to teach us that unmingled pleasures are to 
be sought in heaven, Hannah found in hers. 
Happier than some that have been unequal!y yoked 
with unbelievers, she had a worthy and pious hus- 
band. Never was wife more prized and more loved 
than she. In what esteem Elkanah held her, how 
fondly he cherished her, how dear she was to him, 
and how kind he was to her, appears in the very 
strong and tender terms with which he essays to 
soothe her grief, saying, ‘‘ Why weepest thou? and 
why eatest thou not ? and why is thy heart grieved ? 
Am not I better to thee than ten sons ?” 

As is indicated by that question, her great trial 
was to be childless—a disappointment which, though 
it seems natural for all wives to wish to be mothers, 
either from every Jewish woman hoping to be the 
mother of the Messiah, or for some other reason, 
was more painfully felt by them than it would ap- 
pear to be by other women. But her trial, like a 
wound into which cruel hands rub salt, or some 
other smarting thing, turning ordinary pain into 
intolerable torture, was greatly aggravated and 
embittered by the happier fortune and insolent re- 
proaches of a rival. 

We may be astonished to hear that Hannah had 
a rival; and that a man whom we have seen stand- 
ing up so bravely for the cause of God, and setting 
his breast like a rock against the tide of irreligion 
that swept over the land, should have conformed to 
one of the worst customs of the world. Yet such 
is man! There are spots in the very sun—such 
defects in the brightest Christians as to remind us 
of the words, “I have seen an end of all perfection,” 


252 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Elkanah was a polygamist. To his own misfor- 
tune, not less than to Hannah’s, he had another 
wife besides her. A violation of that law of nature 
which introduces about an equal number of both 
sexes into the world, and a breach also of that re- 
vealed will whereby we are taught that at the first 
it was not so—one woman only being given to the 
man—this practice, though winked at, was punished 
in Elkanah’s case—as it was punished in Jacob’s, in 
David's, in Solomon’s, and is still punished wherever 
polygamy prevails. Homes that might be the 
abodes of peace are disturbed through polygamy 
by intestine broils ; ever and anon swept by storms 
of domestic discord. There envy reigns, furious 
jealousies, and hatred. There rage the worst pas- 
sions that a sense of injury and a false position can 
rouse in woman’s breast. 

In some kind and gentle women Hannah’s mis- 
fortune would have excited feelings of sympathy. 
But the other wife, who had children—a rude, 
coarse, proud, and vulgar woman—turned it into 
an occasion for triumphing over her, and embit- 
tering all the springs of her life. Elkanah loved 
Hannah more than her. Peninnah saw that; and 
to be avenged of a wrong that rankled in her 
bosom, and she could neither forgive nor forget, 
she poured forth the vials of her wrath on the head 
of her innocent but unhappy rival. ‘ Her adver- 
sary,” it is said, ‘“‘also provoked her sore for to 
make her fret, because the Lord had shut up her 
womb.” 

In these circumstances—circumstances to which 
the adage, so generally true, applies with peculiar 
force, “‘ Speech is silvern, but silence is golden”— 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 253 


Hannah teaches us how to bear our trials, whatever 
their nature be; and how to seek, and where to 
find relief. Weep she must—if haply her heart 
overcharged with sorrow, like a dark cloud that 
dissolves itself in showers, may find relief in tears. 
These flow from her eyes, but no word of reproach 
passes her lips. Reviled, she reviled not again. 
She feels as it is in nature, but acts as it is only in 
grace todo. The woman is not lost in the saint, 
nor, as is apt to happen, is the saint lost in the 
woman. Where others, roused to fury, would have 
retaliated, Hannah silently submits ; where others 
would have given themselves up to repinings and 
hopeless grief, Hannah prays. Her patience could 
not conquer Peninnah; but her prayers might 
achieve a greater conquest. By them she might 
prevail with God. In her trouble she sought the 
Lord—by and by to turn the tables on her adver- 
sary ; by and by, in that temple where Peninnah’s 
reproaches had wrung her heart with grief and filled 
her eyes with tears, to stand with a boy at her side 
—an offering to the Lord of her grateful heart, and 
lift up her voice over her enemy, as God’s people 
at last shall over all theirs, singing this magnificent 
ode: 

“My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, mine horn is 
exalted in the Lord, my mouth is enlarged over 
mine enemies ; because I rejoice in thy salvation. 
There is none holy as the Lord: for there is none 
beside thee : neither is there any rock like our God. 
Talk no more so exceeding proudly ; let not arro- 
gancy come out of your mouth ; for the Lord is a 
God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. 
The bows of the mighty men are broken, and thev 


254 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


that stumbled are girded with strength. They that 
were full have hired out themselves for bread ; and 
they that were hungry ceased ; so that the barren 
hath born seven ; and she that hath many children 
is waxed feeble. The Lord killeth, and maketh 
alive : he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth 
up. The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he 
bringeth low, and liftcth up. He raiseth up the 
poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from 
the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to 
make them inherit the throne of glory: for the 
pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and he hath set 
the world upon them. He will keep the feet of his 
saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness ; 
for by strength shall no man prevail. The adver- 
saries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out 
of heaven shall he thunder upon them: the Lord 
shall judge the ends of the earth ; and he shall give 
strength unto his king, and exalt the horn of his 
anointed.” 


HER MEEKNESS. 


A singular phenomenon has sometimes been no- 
ticed atsea. Ina gale, when the storm, increasing 
in violence, has at length risen into a hurricane, the 
force of the wind has been observed to.actually beat 
down the waves, producing a temporary and com- 
parative calm ; and similar is the effect occasionally 
produced by awful and overwhelming trials—these, 
by their very power and pressure on the heart, 
abating both the violence, and the expression of its 
feelings. But what is equally remarkable and still 
more observable in trials is, that we can more 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 255 


easily bear a heavy blow from God’s hand than a 
light one from man’s. Conscious of sin, we feel 
that He has a right to afflict, where man has none. 
Job, for example, sat on the ruins of his fortune 
and the grave of all his children to kiss the rod 
that had smitten him, and say, as he put his hand 
on the mouth of a mother who was raging like a 
bear bereaved of her whelps, “Shall we receive 
good at the hands of the Lord, and not receive evil 
also? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, 
and blessed be the name of the Lord!” Yet when 
his friends—his ‘‘ miserable comforters,” as he called 
them—but rudely touched the wounds God’s hand 
had made, he winced. Their injurious speeches 
broke him down; and losing the magnanimous 
patience with which he had seen his family and for- 
tune buried in one day, in a common grave, he now 
exclaims, ‘‘Oh that God would grant my request: 
that God would grant me the thing I long for ; that 
it would please God to destroy me ; that he would 
let loose his hand and cut me off. My soul 
chooseth strangling and death rather than my life. 
Wherefore hast thou brought me forth out of the 
womb? Othat I had given up the ghost and no 
eye had seen me!” It has been also observed that 
it is much more difficult to meekly bear wrongs in- 
flicted by friends—by such as we revere, respect, or 
love—than by the hands of enemies. Hence the 
emphasis of those complaints which in respect of 
the wrongs our Lord suffered, and suffers still, from 
the sins of His people, not only from such treachery 
as Iscariot’s, but such denials as Peter’s and such 
desertion as the other disciples’, we may ascribe to 
him, “Mine own familiar friend hath lifted up the 


256 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


heel against me ;” “These are the wounds with 
which I was wounded in the house of my friends !” 
Now under such a wrong how admirable the meek- 
ness, how sanctified the temper, of Hannah! 
Smarting under the cruel reproaches of her rival, 
overwhelmed with grief, to use the very words of 
Scripture, ‘‘in bitterness of soul,” she lingers in the 
temple behind the rest, and there alone, as she 
supposed, pours out her tears and prayers before 
the Lord. Resting after the work of the day— 
heavy on an aged man—but unseen by her, Eli 
sits by a post of the temple. Her sobs and sighs, 
perhaps, calling his attention, he turns—to see a 
woman there. Tears stream down her cheeks. 
Hers is a sorrow with which no stranger could 
intermeddle, and God, who hears in secret, alone 
could cure. So while calling on Him, and vowing 
that if He will give her a man-child, he shall be the 
Lord’s all the days of his life, Hannah prays in 
silence. But though no sound was heard, her lips 
moved; while probably her body, sympathizing 
with the agitation of her spirit, as it often does 
under violent grief, kept rocking all the while. 
His eyes dim as well as his head gray with years, 
Eli--too much accustomed in these evil times to 
see abandoned women—thought she was drunk; 
and more ready, like other weak, indulgent fathers, 
to discover and reprove sin in others than in his 
own sons, he addresses her sharply, saying, “‘ How 
long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine 
from thee.” A grave and very offensive accusa- 
tion! Under such a charge, and in the rapid alter- 
nation with which the mind passes from one 
passion to another, who would have been asto- 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 1) e577 


nished had her grief suddenly changed to anger ? 
We dare not have blamed this highly virtuous as 
well as broken-hearted woman, had she repelled 
with indignation so foul a charge. It was hard 
enough to suffer Peninnah’s scoffs ; but it is harder 
to have insult added to injury, and her bleeding 
wounds, as now, torn wider by the hands that 
should have closed them. The meekness of Moses 
has become a proverb; and justly so. But did he, 
did any man or woman, ever show a milder, 
gentler, lovelier spirit, a more magnanimous 
example of how to suffer wrong, than Hannah 
when, without one angry look or tone, she replied, 
““No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit ; 
I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but 
have poured out my soul before the Lord. Count 
not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for 
out of the abundance of my complaint and grief 
have I spoken hitherto.” No wonder that Eli, per- 
ceiving the wrong he had done, should have turned 
his reproaches on himself; and touched with 
Hannah’s grief, answered and said, ‘‘Go in peace: 
and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition that 
thou hast asked of him.” 


HER FAITH. 


I know an island that stands crowned by its 
ancient fortalice in the middle of a lake, some good 
bow-shots from the shore. With the walls of the 
old ruin mantled in ivy, and its tower rising grim 
and gray above the foliage of hoary elms, it serves 
no purpose now but to recall old times and orna- 
ment a lovely landscape. But once that island 

17 


258 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


and its stronghold were the refuge and life of those 
whose ordinary residence was the castle that, with 
gates, and bulwarks, and many a tower, and float- 
ing banner rose in baronial pride on the shore. 
When in the troublous times of old that was 
beleagured, and its defenders could hold it out no 
longer against the force and fury of the siege, they 
sought their boats, and, escaping by the postern 
gate over waters too deep to wade and too broad 
to swim, threw themselves on the island—within 
the walls of the stout old keep to enjoy peace in 
the midst of war, and safe beyond the shot of cross- 
bow, to laugh their enemies to scorn. In their 
hardest plight, and against the greatest numbers, 
this refuge never failed them. 

Such a refuge and relief his people find in God. 
Hence the confidence and bold language of the 
Psalmist, ‘‘Truly my soul waiteth upon God; 
from him cometh my salvation. He only is my 
rock and my salvation ; he is my defence: I shall 
not be greatly moved. In God is my salvation 
and my glory; the rock of my strength, and my 
refuge, isin God. Trust in him at all times: ye 
people, pour out your heart before him: God is a 
refuge for us.” Hence, also, in allusion to the 
security such strongholds offered in the East, as 
well as here, in olden times, the Bible says, ‘‘ The 
name of the Lord is a strong tower, into which 
the righteous runneth, and is safe.” And thus, as 
prayer is our way of access to God, and the means 
by which we place ourselves under his protection, 
it is a resource that never fails. There is no evil 
from which it does not offer escape; no sin of 
which it may not, through the application of 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 259 


Christ’s blood, procure the pardon ; nor any temp- 
tation over which, calling in the aids of the Holy 
Spirit, it may not achieve a victory. There is no 
burden too heavy for the back of prayer to carry, 
nor wound too deep for its balm to heal. It pro- 
vides comfort in all the sorrows, relief amid all the 
troubles, and a cure for all the ills of life. When 
her rival vexed, and her husband tried in vain to 
comfort her, teaching us what to do and where to 
go, Hannah sought her comfort in prayer. That 
door remained open when all others were shut ; 
that spring filled the fountain to its lip when all 
other streams were dry. She found in God the 
comfort that she sought. She longed to have a 
man-child ; and had such faith in God as to believe 
that, though it might seem a miracle, He was able 
to grant her request, and, in the words of the psalm, 
“make the barren woman te keep house, and be a 
joyful mother of children.” And He who helped 
Hannah to conceive such faith, helped her to con- 
ceive ason. Let her case teach us that the way 
to get anything is first to get faith—‘‘all things 
are possible to him that believeth.” 

There are people, who claim to be philosophers, 
that laugh such hopes to scorn. Amid evidences 
of a divine wisdom, power, and goodness, visible 
and bright as the sun at noonday, they cannot say, 
what “the fool saith in his heart, There is no God ;” 
but their God is not our God, nor is ‘“‘ their rock 
like unto our Rock.” According to them God 
leaves all events to the operation of what they call 
“the ordinary laws of nature,” without guiding, 
controlling, overruling, or interfering with them in 
any way whatever. No wonder that with such 


260 STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


views the Divine Being is to them neither an object 
of reverential worship nor of filial affection. How 
should they fear, or love God? Their God is a 
Sovereign, who, parting with his sceptre though he 
retains his crown, is denuded of all authority—a 
Father who, careless of their fate, casts his children 
out on the world, like the poor babe a guilty 
mother exposes, which, though it may perchance 
be pitied and protected by others, is cruelly forsaken 
by the author of its being. How dark and dreary 
such a philosophy! All nature, and every religion, 
Pagan as well as Christian, revolts against it. And 
I cannot but regard them as the greatest enemies 
of mankind who, denying the efficacy, would 
silence the voice of prayer; and sweep away the 
last refuge of wretchedness; and quench the one 
hope that shines to many over life’s troubled 
waters ; and plunge our world into the darkness of 
a perpetual eclipse—into the sorrows and miseries 
of a home where wife and children stand helpless 
around the bed on which their guide, and guar- 
dian, and protector, and bread-winner, lies deaf, 
and mute, and cold, in death. 

Some one has said of prayer, It moves the hand 
that moves the world. A grand truth! to a poor 
conscious-stricken sinner, to an alarmed soul, to an 
anxious, weary, trembling spirit, a truth more pre- 
cious than all science and philosophy. Hannah 
believed it. Nor—encouraging us to cast ourselves 
in faith on the promises of God in Jesus Christ, on 
the ample bosom of his love, and into the almighty 
arms of his providence—did Hannah believe in 
vain. She left the temple, and went home, a 
changed and happy woman. ‘“ She went her way,” 


HANNAH THE MATRON. 261 


it is said, “‘and did eat, and her countenance was 
no more sad ;” and came back betimes to say to 
Eli, as leading Samuel by the hand she presented 
him to the aged priest, ‘“‘O my lord, as thy soul 
liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee 
here, praying unto the Lord: for this child I 
prayed ; and the Lord hath given me my petition 
which I asked of him: therefore also I have lent 
him to the Lord: as long as he liveth he shall be 
lent to the Lord.” 


262 STUDIES OF CHARACTEP 


Samuel the Buler. 


IN the county of Forfar is a city which, though 
more than once carried by storm, sacked and 
burned by the armies of England, possesses some 
interesting ecclesiastical ruins. Close by its old 
cathedral stands the finest specimen extant of those 
round towers, whose origin is lost amid the mists 
ofan extreme antiquity. England hasnone. They 
were once rather numerous in Ireland: and Scot- 
land retains still the only two she ever had—one at 
Brechin, the other, a much less imposing structure, 
at Abernethy, on the banks of the Tay. Like the 
fires that blaze from many a height and hill on the 
night of St. John’s day, like the practice, not every- 
where yet fallen into desuetude, of visiting certain 
wells and washing with dew on the first morning of 
May, these towers are believed by many to be ves- 
tiges of old Pagan worship. They bear a remark- 
able resemblance to some structures found in India: 
and like the customs I have referred to, are sup- 
posed by some to have been connected with the 
adoration of the sun—that form of idolatry which 
appeared at an early period among the descendants 
of Noah, and was carried along with them, as they 
advanced in successive waves, over the face of the 
unpeopled earth. 

Near by that tower in Brechin, and forming the 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 263 


last battle-field in our island against the aggressions 
of Papal Rome, stood a principal station of the 
Culdees—those first and early missionaries who, 
coming originally from Ireland, and having their 
chief seat in Iona, converted the Scotch to the 
Christian faith, and the inhabitants also of the 
northern parts of England.. Their college, of which 
the name, attached to some gardens, still survives, 
stood under the shadow of that beautiful tower ; 
and it was probably from their hands that it received 
—in a figure of our Lord on the cross, which stands 
above the doorway, flanked on either side by the 
mouldering form of a pilgrim—the Christian em- 
blems it bears. It was a questionable policy, still 
it was a common practice with many of the early 
Christian missionaries, for the purpose of winning 
over the people from heathenism and of recom- 
mending the new faith, to link it on to the old. 
For example, they appointed Christian festivals to 
be celebrated at the time set apart by use and 
wont for heathen ones. Hence the festival of St. 
John’s day was held at the time the heathens had 
been accustomed to celebrate the rites of Baal, 
and kindle fires in honor of their god. Hence, 
also, the name of Easter, which is said to be 
borrowed from the worship of Astarte, or Ash- 
taroth, or the Queen of Heaven, or the moon; 
and hence the crosses that were cut by the early 
missionaries, and may still be seen in Brittany, on 
its numerous menhirs—those vast monoliths of 
granite which are supposed to have belonged to 
the old Druidical worship, and were everywhere 
regarded by the people with feelings of sacred 
veneration. Abutting against this old round tower, 


264 © STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


and casting its shadow over the site of the college 
of the Culdees, stands the cathedral, with its gray 
steeples and roofless chancel,a monument of Popish 
times. It is now the parish church, having been 
turned into a place of Protestant worship ; though, 
like cathedrals everywhere, with its long lines of 
massive Gothic pillars, as little fitted as it was in- 
tended for the preaching of the Gospel. Thus, and 
there, within a space more limited than is perhaps 
to be found anywhere else,—as a geological map 
shows the various strata that constitute the crust 
of the earth,—this old city of Forfarshire shows us 
in Pagan, in Culdee, in Popish, and in Protestant 
objects, monuments of the successive religious 
faiths and forms of the country. 

Removed by some distance from these, and almost 
concealed from view in an obscure zwyzd, or alley, 
of the same town, stand the ruins of an old chapel. 
As an acknowledgment of God’s overruling provi- 
dence and an expression of man’s devout gratitude, 
it has a sacred and instructive history. On this 
account, though the shafts of its windows are shat- 
tered and broken, and the teeth of time have left 
little else on its mouldering walls than the faint 
traces of angel and saintly figures, and though since 
I remember, profaned, as some would say, to the 
base purposes of byres and stables, these ruins form 
one of the most interesting of the relics that cluster 
about that old town. Standing for six hundred 
years, they have had a long life ; yet their history 
may be briefly told. 

In those rude times which long preceded the birth 
of science in our country, when there was no appli- 
ance of steam to wear vessels off the dangers of a 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 265 


fee-shore, nor lights shone forth on sunken reef or 
rocky headland to guide them through the gloom 
of night, one of the royal family of Scotland was in 
imminent hazard of shipwreck. After every effort 
had been made, but made in vain, to wear off shore, 
he vowed a vow that if God would interpose to 
deliver them from death, he would build and endow 
a chapel, as an acknowledgment of God’s gracious 
interposition and an expression of his own grati- 
tude. They were saved. In the words of the 
Psalm, ‘‘ They. looked unto Him and were lightened: 
and their faces were not ashamed: this poor man 
cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out 
ef all his troubles.” And, though a Papist, a better 
man than many Protestants who forget, in the day 
of returned health or prosperity, the vows and reso- 
lutions formed in an hour of trouble, he fulfilled his 
promise. In the erection of Mazson Dieu Chapel, 
for so it is called, David, Earl of Huntingdon, paid 
his vow. Associated though it be with popish 
superstitions, it sprung from higher motives than 
either ecclesiastical pride or sectarian rivalry ; and 
humble as these ruins are now, they form a vene- 
rable and interesting memorial of the simple faith, 
and devout piety, that ever and anon, like the blaze 
of a brilliant meteor, lighted up the long night of 
the dark ages of the Church. 

Such dedications and vows, as those to which 
that chapel owed its existence, have fallen into too 
great disuse. They may indeed be made to assume 
the profane appearance of driving a bargain with 
God—such a bargain as man makes with his fellows 
on change, or in the market. They are not to be 
made as if we could purchase the divine favor; or, 


266 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


as if God were to be propitiated by any offerings of 
ours ; or, as if demanding, if I may say so, a guid 
pro quo, He gave nothing but “for a consideration.” 

Such ideas are involved in many popish vows. 
They run counter to the blessed truth that He who 
spared not his own Son will with him also freely 
give us all things. Dishonoring the character of 
God, popery makes merchandise of his mercy ; 
and practically denying salvation by his free grace 
and the blood of his Son Jesus Christ, sells pardons 
for money, and makes profit out of sins. But her 
abuses ought not to have been allowed to bring into 
disrepute a class of vows for which we have the 
highest authority—a service it were graceful in 
Christians to render, and, in Hannahs dedicating 
their children, and people their substance, to God, 
it were well for the interests of his Church to revive. 
Such vows were made in its earliest ages, and by its 
most distinguished saints ; and, as in the case of 
him who said on the eve of battle, ‘‘If thou shalt 
without fail deliver the children of Ammon into 
mine hands, then it shall be that whatever cometh 
out of the doors of my house to meet me shall 
surely be the Lord’s,” they were faithfully performed 
—even where they involved the greatest sacrifices. 
Take these examples. On that sacred spot where 
Jacob, fleeing from a brother’s wrath, saw the 
ladder that, alive with angels, some ascending and 
some descending, rose from earth and reached 
to heaven, he vowed such a vow, saying, “If God 
will be with me, and will keep me in the way that I 
go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to 
put on, so that I come again to my father’s house 
in peace, then shall the Lord be my God; and 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 267 


this stone which I have set up for a pillar shall be 
God’s house ; and of all that thou shalt give me I 
will surely give the tenth unto thee.” David also 
teaches us by his example to join promises to 
prayer, and undertake, if our requests are granted, 
to express our gratitude by gifts as well as by 
words. He says, alluding to some time of sore and 
heavy trials, ‘Thou, O God, hast proved us ; thou 
hast tried us as silver is tried ; thou broughtest us 
into the net ; thou laidst affliction on our loins; 
thou hast caused men to ride over our heads ; we 
went through fire and water, but thou broughtest 
us out into a wealthy place. I will go into thy 
house with burnt offerings; I will pay thee my 
vows which my lips have uttered, and my mouth 
hath spoken, when I was in trouble.” 

The devout, but too much neglected, practice 
which these famous saints observed, Hannah also 
recommends to our imitation. It was in the per- 
formance of such a vow that she returned to the 
house of God, not empty-handed ; but to earn, if I 
may say so, the high encomium pronounced on her 
of whom our Lord said, ‘‘ She hath given all she had.” 
In that child of prayer, her only son, the boy whom 
she leads lovingly by the hand, Hannah presented to 
God a gift more beautiful and costly, more precious 
far, than Jacob’s tithe of corn and cattle, or David’s 
richest spoils of war. It wrings her heart to part 
with him. Without her boy, his prattling tongue, 
and pattering feet, and playful sports, and fond 
caresses, how dull and dreary her home will seem! 
But she got him from God, and to God she is here 
to give him—as taking Samuel by the hand she 
goes up to Eli, saying, ‘Oh my lord, as thy soul 


268 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee 
praying tothe Lord. For this child I prayed, and 
the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked 
of Him. Therefore also I have lent him to the 
Lord ; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the 
Lord.” 

A blessed contrast to another woman, the un- 
happy partner of Ananias’ guilt and also of his 
doom, who, pretending, while a part was withheld, 
that the whole price had been given, lied to the 
Holy Ghost, Hannah, in going to perform her vow, 
like a martyr marching to the stake, “ walks in her 
integrity.” Her case was different from ours. We 
enter into the engagements of a communion-table 
publicly, and before the Church —calling God and 
man to witness that we give ourselves to Christ, 
and will die with, rather than deny, Him. It is 
well to do so. The publicity of our vows helps to 
the performance of them. For, though the domi- 
nent power in the heart of every Christian will be 
the love of Christ—that love which constraineth us 
to judge that if one died for all then were all dead, 
and that He died that they who live should not live 
to themselves, but to Him who died for them—we 
are none the worse, but the better of auxiliary mo- 
tives. With the tide running strong against him, 
setting earthward, he who would go to heaven will 
find he needs to crowdall sailuponthe mast. There 
are circumstances in which, unless we would abandon 
the path of duty, we must take up a position against 
the world, and say with Paul, “It is a small thing 
for me to be judged of man’s judgment; He that 
judgeth me is God ;” yet it will often help to keep 
us on our guard, and out of the ways of sin, to feel 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 269 


that the eye of others is upon us; that we have 
bound ourselves publicly, before the church and 
world, to pay our vows and live consistently with 
our Christian profession. But Hannah’s case was 
peculiar. She might, repenting of her vow, have 
hept back not a part of the price, but the whole; 
nor thereby laid herself open to challenge or cen- 
sure ; to the taunts of Peninnah, her enemy, or of 
any one else. When she vowed that if God would 
give her a son, he should be the Lord’s, Eli saw her 
lips move ; but no more—and hearing nothing took 
her for a drunken woman. Only God and she her- 
self knew what these lips had said. That was 
enough for Hannah. It should be so for us. 
“Thou God seest me,” should place us in circum- 
stances of greater restraint than broad daylight, 
the public street, the eyes of a theatre of spectators ; 
even so it was a sufficient reason for Hannah per- 
forming her vow that God had heard the words of 
her noisless lips, and that the vow, though a secret 
to others, was none to Him. Though in accents 
inaudible to mortal ears, she had opened her mouth 
to the Lord ; and when her heart gave way as she 
looked on her boy, and kissed him, and thought 
how much she should miss him, and how dull and 
dreary home would be without him, her answer to 
Nature—to all the mother yearning within her— 
was Jephthah’s, as, bending over his daughter, 
his only beloved child, he exclaimed, “I have 
opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go 
back !” 

A weman and a mother, one in whose heart 
Samuel filled up the great blank, by his birth rolling 
away her reproach, and brightening the whole warld 


270 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


to her, Hannah paid her vow with a resolution 
equal to Jephthah’s. In this, in dedicating Samuel 
to the Lord, and parting with him, how does she 
put us to shame !—presenting an example of grati- 
tude to God, and a pious regard for his honor and 
service, which few do, and yet all should try to 
emulate. To any mother, but especially to one of 
her keen and lively sensibilities, the parting with 
her son at his tender age must have been felt an 
awful wrench—the next thing to death, nor that a 
common death, but the bereavement whose grief 
He who knows a parent’s feelings selects as that 
which our sorrow for sin should resemble, saying, 
“ They shall look on him whom they have pierced, 
and mourn as one mourneth for an only son, and 
be in bitterness as one is in bitterness for a first- 
born.” Samuel was Hannah’s only son, and, at 
that time, her only child. 

It is to the honor of Hannah’s sex that the only 
two offerings on which Jesus, He who offered him- 
self for her and us on the cross, ever bestowed the 
need of his applause, were both made by women. 
The one was a widow. Poor, and meanly clad, in 
her offering as much as in her dress, she presented 
a remarkable contrast to many who, sweeping into 
the house of God, attired in all the gayeties of 
changing fashions, give a wide berth to the plate at 
the door, or drop into the offertory, without a blush 
of shame, the merest, meanest pittance. Though 
but two mites, hers was a munificent gift, being her 
little all. ‘‘ Verily,” said our Lord to his disciples, 
as he pointed her out to their notice and admira- 
tion—“ Verily, I say unto you, this poor widow 
hath cast more in than all they have cast into the 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 271 


treasury; for all they”—meaning those among 
whose shining heap of gold and silver her mites 
seemed mean, and unworthy of a place—‘“all they 
did cast in of their abundance, but she of her want 
did cast in all she had, even all her living.” The 
other woman, praised by Him whom all heaven 
praises, was one—strange as it will appear to such 
as have not reflected on the blessed truth, that a 
fallen is not necessarily a Jost woman—from whose 
touch decency and decorum shrinks. As the phrase 
went, ‘she was a sinner.” Lying, where all have 
need, and the purest love, to lie, at Jesus’ feet, she 
washes them with a flood of tears ; and, shaking 
out her golden locks, she wipes them with the hairs 
of her head : with mingled reverence and affection, 
kisses them ; and, taking an alabaster box of pre- 
cious ointment, pours its fragrance on the feet that 
for her, and us, were to be nailed on Calvary. 
Simon,” said our Lord to the Pharisee who would 
aave driven the penitent from his door, and indeed 
doubted whether our Lord could be a prophet be- 
cause he had allowed her to touch him—‘“ Simon, 
seest thou this woman? [entered into thine house 
—thou gavest me no water for my feet, but she 
hath washed my feet with her tears, and wiped 
them with the hairs of her head. Thcu gavest me 
ne kiss, but this woman, since the time I came in, 
hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil 
thou didst not anoint, but this woman hath anointed 
my feet with ointment.”—“ Why was this waste of 
the ointment made ?”—“ Let her alone. Verily, I 
say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be 
preached throughout the whole world, this also 


272 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memo- 
rial of her.” 

Beside these women Hannah deserves a place. 
In her dedication of Samuel, in giving him up who 
was the light of her eyes and the joy of her home, 
she parted for God’s sake and his service with the 
costliest, the most prized and precious, thing in her 
possession. Her only son, and indeed her only 
child, in giving him—with a munificence not second, 
but in some aspects superior, to the widow’s—she 
gave all she had. lt was a great sacrifice. Yet to 
emulate and even surpass it, were that possible, 
nothing more is necessary than that we form an 
adequate estimate of what we owe for, and owe to, 
Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit help us to do 
so! Did we estimate and feel that aright, in what 
willing services, by what costly gifts, through what 
munificent offerings, in what noble sacrifices, should 
we embody the rapt and grateful exclamation of 
the Apostle. ‘Thanks be unto God for his un- 
speakable gift.” 

Before turning the dedication of Samuel to a prac- 
tical, and—especially in these days, when there is 
so much need of more ministers and a better pro- 
vision for them—to a very important practical use, 
let me observe, that though we may have to wait 
for the reward and recompense in heaven, Hannah 
had not so long to wait. She says of Samuel, “I 
have /ent him to the Lord ;” and God paid her good 
interest for the loan. Being her chief earthly en- 
joyment, was he, so to speak, her life? Ages before 
the great words were uttered by the lips of Jesus, 
she proved the truth of His saying, ‘‘ Whosoever 
will save his life shall lose it, aiid whosoever will 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 273 


lose his life for my sake shall find it.” She got 
back all, and more than all, she had lost—she had 
given away. ‘There is that scattereth,” says the 
wise man, “and yet increaseth ; and there is that 
withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to 
poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat.” 
Such was Hannah’s experience. She gave away 
one child, and God paid her back with five; and 
promptly too. When taking farewell of her boy, 
she had wept over him, and kissed him, and torn 
herself away from his embraces and entwining 
arms, and gone to her lonely home, it is said, ‘‘ The 
Lord visited Hannah, so that she conceived and 
bare three sons and two daughters.” And, at 
some time, in some form or other, the offerings we 
present to God, the bread our faith casts upon the 
waters, will return. Heaven and earth shall pass 
away, but not this word: ‘“‘ THERE IS NO MAN 
THAT HATH LEFT HOUSE, OR BRETHREN, OR SIS- 
TERS, OR FATHER, OR MOTHER, OR WIFE, OR 
CHILDREN, OR LANDS, FOR MY SAKE AND THE 
GOSPEL’S, BUT SHALL RECEIVE AN HUNDRED-FOLD 
NOW IN THIS TIME, AND IN THE WORLD TO 
COME ETERNAL LIFE.” 


HIS DEDICATION. 


To turn the dedication of Samuel to a season- 
able and important use, let me ask why so few 
parents now follow Hannah’s example? why so 
few either dedicate themselves, or are dedicated 
by others to the Christian ministry ? When other 
professions are overstocked, why is it that almost 
all the churches, both in this country and in Ame- 

: 18 


274 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


rica, are complaining of a lack of candidates for the 
sacred office, and especially of such as possess not 
only the piety, but the talents and culture which 
it requires ? 

Without looking to the claims of the heathen 
world, which, with 600,000,000 of human beings 
left to perish for lack of missionaries, is crying, 
“Come over and help us,” or to the state of Europe 
—to so great an extent either bound in the chains 
of Popery, or drifting, like a vessel broken loose 
from its anchors, away from all religious faith, our 
own country requires a much larger staff of minis- 
ters. Not otherwise are its overgrown cities to be 
redeemed from a state of practical heathenism ; 
not otherwise are the civil and religious privileges 
which our fathers watered with their tears and 
nourished with their blood, to be preserved from 
ruin—certain and not very distant ruin. Take 
London, for instance. Its condition, as ascertained 
by inquiries in connection with Bishop Tait’s Fund, 
is alarming, and indeed appalling. Look at this 
extract from its report ; and let my readers, while 
studying it, bear in mind that in the estimates 
which the Bishop makes, the presence and labors 
of Dissenters are not ignored; a large margin is 
left for the efforts they make to supply the spiritual 
necessities of the diocese : ‘‘ We have now to state 
the result of our inquiries into the present religious 
condition of the diocese of London. From the 
returns obtained at this time, and from other 
sources, it appears that out of all the parishes and 
districts included in the diocese (amounting to about 
450), about 239 are already provided up to the 
measure of the standards adopted. They will, 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 275 


therefore, for the present be left out of consideration 
in estimating the wants of the diocese. The re- 
maining 211 parishes have been classed as follows, 
according to the amount of their deficiency: 


L As regards deficiency of clergy,—one clergyman only. 





Class. Parishes. Gross population. 
L for 8,000 and upwards...... 15 Be eee 228,000 
IL from 6,000 to 8,000.......... pS he baba Nee 171,400 
BE” 4,000 t0'6,000225--22..- eee 757,300 
IV. ” 2,000 to 4,000......... ORs aan ease os 919,300 

Not deficient in clergy, but in ' 

church-room.......-...2.:: ce eee 74,000 
Zt Se eee 2 Ser <a 2,150,000 


The total population of those 211 deficient parishes 
is about 2,150,000, the number of clergy is 582. 
But this number of clergy on the standard assumed 
is sufficient for the supervision of 1,164,000 only 
(making allowance, as we have done, for the labors 
of other religious bodies) ; there remains, therefore, 
a population of very nearly 1,000,000 of persons for 
whom a further provision of 500 clergy would be 
required.” 

The diocese of London alone, taking into account 
the proportion of the different Dissenting bodies, 
requires for a sufficient spiritual provision nearly 
One Thousand additional ministers of the gospel ; 
and if so, how great must be the increase required 
by the whole country, with its overgrown towns, and 
thickly-peopled mining and manufacturing districts ? 

But ours are times in which quality is hardly a 
less important element than quantity. It is not 
now as in bygone days, when the pulpit was 
almost the only public organ, and had it all its 
own way. In the press and platform, in associa- 


276 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


tions for science and the arts, in mechanics’ and 
philosophical institutions, it finds formidable rivals ; 
not seldom formidable antagonists. The public 
taste, elevated by the able writing of those journals 
which are so widely read, demands a high style of 
preaching ; while there is abroad such a spirit of 
inquiry and of lawless doubt as requires ministers 
thoroughly equipped for their work—highly edu- 
cated and accomplished men; able to meet the 
sceptic on the fields ofscience to give a reason for the 
faith that is in them, to protect that of others from 
being rudely shaken, and to defend against all 
comers the integrity and authority of the Word of 
God. 

In such circumstances it is alarming to hear on 
every hand, and from all the churches both of Great 
Britain and America, complaints that the number 
of those offering themselves for the ministry, in- 
stead of increasing with the increase of population, 
and growing with the growing wants of society, is 
falling off; and that the candidates are not only 
falling off in numbers, but in many instances in 
fitness for the work. The number of them, for 
example, from the universities at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge during the ten years preceding 1864 fell off 
oy eighty a-year. “It is certain,” said the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury in his primary charge deli- 
vered in the above-mentioned year, “it is certain 
from correct statistical returns, that the number of 
candidates ordained as deacons has diminished in 
the last ten years on an average of sixty-five per 
year.” Nor are matters improved since then. For 
what is the conclusion at which one thoroughly 
conversant with the subject has arrived? ‘It ap- 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 277 


pears,” he states, ‘‘that the number of clergymen 
ordained is not only decreasing, but in an increasing 
ratio, while the proportion of university men is 
declining, and of iterates (candidates who have 
received only an inferior education) is increasing. 
The calibre of those entering the ministry of late 
years has been gradually deteriorating, and we are 
threatened with one of the greatest misfortunes that 
can befall a nation—a clergy who in intellect are 
not superior to the public they profess to teach.” 

The existence of this evil in all churches, endowed 
and unendowed, Dissenting as well as Established, 
is unquestionable ; and we should tremble for the 
ark of God but that we know it to be not irreme- 
diable. The Christian people of this great and 
wealthy nation have the remedy in their own hands. 
May God make them like “the children of Issachar, 
which were men that had understanding of the 
times, to know what Israel ought to do!” 

It is worse than useless to blink the matter 
The main reason why there are so few Hannahs 
among the parents of our Christian families, and 
why so few youths of promise and of powers come 
forward to offer themselves for service in the house 
of God, lies in the inadequate provision made for 
ministers: in the fact which, if people did not 
know, they ought to have known, that with excep- 
tional cases, and these rare, ministers do not 
receive allowances sufficient for their comfortable 
maintenance. Many a man who spends his life 
in the service of the church has to struggle with 
pecuniary difficulties to its close, and leave, when 
he dies, his widow and children without the means 
of support. 


278 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


This is true of all churches, Established and 
Dissenting. Take for example the Church of Eng- 
land—with a clergy often represented as wallowing 
in wealth. Their position is not seldom a very 
painful one; and so discreditable that I wonder 
how her adherents, wealthy and willing as large 
numbers of them are, do not of their own bounty 
supply what is lacking in the endowments of the 
Church. Years ago the condition of some of them 
presented itself before me in a way that equally 
moved my sorrow and astonishment. On arriving 
at Mr. Nisbet’s; the well-known publisher’s, Berners 
Street, London, a private carriage was leaving his 
door from which I saw a large bundle given out. 
On passing this bundle, which lay in the lobby, 
Mr. Nisbet touched it with his foot, saying, ‘‘ You'll 
not guess what that is. That,” he added, “is old 
clothes, cast-off clothes for the families of poor but 
worthy miuisters of the Church of England. I 
receive and distribute a large quantity of them 
every year, and they are most thankfully received.” 
I stood amazed at this ; that men of education and 
accomplishments, of refinement and piety, who 
were devoting their strength and talents to the 
cause of our Redeemer, should be placed in such 
humiliating circumstances. It was a shame; but 
the shame did not belong tothem. Yet how bitter 
to be reduced to the necessity of receiving such 
charity !—for a man of delicate feelings to see his 
wife, a refined and well-born and high minded lady, 
walking to church with their children in cast-off 
clothes! I could not have been more grieved, but 
I should have been less astonished, had I known 
then, as I do now, the utterly inadequate provision 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 279 


made for many of the ministers of that Church. 
While the whole revenues of archiepiscopal and 
episcopal sees, of the cathedral and collegiate 
churches, of the several dignities and benefices of 
the Church of England, were they divided among 
all her clergy, would not yield to each more than 
4259 a year, what is the actual state of matters? 
There are more than 5,000 livings inthe Church of 
England which do not amount to £200a year. In 
Wales, in 1853, more than one-half of the bene- 
fices were below £100. In the diocese of St. David’s 
nearly the half were below that miserable living. 
In the diocese of Durham, out of 260 benefices 62 
were below £150. In the diocese of Carlisle, out of 
249 benefices, 151 were below £150, and 95 below 
even £100. And at this moment, out of 5,000 
curates, most of whom have the feelings, and have 
received the education, and are expected to make 
the appearance of gentlemen, many do not receive 
so much as the salary of a junior clerk, or the 
wages of a skilled artizan. 

All the churches have to take shame to them- 
selves for the scanty provision made for their 
ministers. But now-a-days this long-standing 
grievance is greatly aggravated. Of late years our 
country has grown enormously in wealth. For in- 
stance, the amount of income assessable for the 
property and income tax in Scotland, which was 
twenty-one millions in 1842, had risen in 1867 to 
thirty-nine millions, had nearly doubled itself in 
that time ; but no corresponding increase has been 
made in the allowances to ministers, endowed or 
unendowed. The following tables show how other 


280 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


classes have been benefited by the prosperity of the 
country. In Glasgow per week— 


Masons received in 1846, 22s. 6d, but in 1866, 32s. 


Blacksmiths % 18s. 7 26s. 
Laborers & 15s. *e 20s. 
Slaters od 18s. hh 27s. 


In Glasgow, per year, certain employees of com< 
mercial houses 


Received in 1846, £100, but in 1866, £200 
” ” 


Others 200 350 
” ” ” 130 ” 250 
” f ” ” 119 ” 301 
»” ” ” 100 ” 250 


But while, as might be inferred from these state- 
ments, that are but specimens, all classes have 
largely benefited by the tide of prosperity with 
which God has blessed our country, those who 
serve at his altars, the ministers of the Gospel, have 
been left as poor, or rather, in consequence of the 
rise on prices, poorer than ever. 

In a collection of old pamphlets I have found a 
very able and admirable address on this subject by 
the late Rev. Dr. Peddie, which reads so much as 
if it had been written for our own day that it would 
be well to republish it. He says: 

“The circumstances of the times require that 
ministers of the gospel should be better educated, if 
possible, than when information was less generally 
diffused, and the learned were less generally hostile 
to religion; but the difficulty of obtaining persons 
regularly educated for the ministry has, at the same 
time, greatly increased. The prosperous state of 
our country holds out to young men, even of very 
moderate talents, almost as soon as they have 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 281 


quitted school, invitations to competency, respect- 
ability, and affluence, in many different lines of 
business, while the youth who would count it his 
honor to serve God in the Gospel of his Son, is 
discouraged from making the attempt, or arrested 
in his progress, by difficulties which he knows not 
how to surmount. Even pious parents who are in 
circumstances to educate their children for the 
ministry without serious inconvenience to them- 
selves, now for the most part dissuade them. 
They grudge to make large advances for which 
they can scarcely expect any adequate return: and 
when they see the companions of their son, perhaps 
his inferiots in years and talents, already ad- 
vanced far on the road to affluence, while he con- 
tinues in a state of dependence, and has no prospect, 
however successful in his pursuit, of ever advancing 
many degrees beyond poverty, they think them- 
selves justified in their attempts to induce him to 
abandon so unprofitable a profession. Necessity 
may compel men already in the office to struggle 
with poverty, or they may feel it to be their duty 
to persevere in laboring among a people who are 
undutiful and unkind ; but the same obligations are 
not upon individuals who are yet free, to devote 
themselves to the ministry at the expense of sacri- 
ficing those conveniences and comforts to which 
their station entitles them, and which many of 
their people enjoy. 

“That some persons grudge the necessary ex- 
pense of maintaining the Gospel, is too well known 
for us to affect to conceal it ; but these, we trust, 
are few ; and they are seldom either the best in- 
formed or the most amiable and exemplary ameng 


282 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


you. They are persons, in general, so parsimonious, 
and so devoted to ‘the unrighteous mammon,’ as 
equally to murmur at whatever is expended on the 
poor, on their ministers, or on themselves; or, if 
they are liberal in answering the calls of appe- 
tite, and in complying with every demand of 
fashion, and narrow only when the honor of the 
Gospel and the comfort of its ministers are inte- 
rested, they give such decided evidence of dislike 
to the Gospel of Christ, and of aversion to his 
yoke, as justifies us in accounting them ‘spots in 
your feasts of charity. What is it that such per- 
sons would persuade you to refuse as unreasonable 
and oppressive? One lust is more expensive to its 
unhappy slave than all the ordinances of the 
Gospel. The idle fashions of the world, to which 
even the more sober among you occasionally con- 
form, make larger demands upon you every season 
than the necessities of your ministers ever did ; and 
they are cheerfully answered. Yea, more money is 
sometimes extracted from your pockets to serve up 
one unnecessary entertainment, than would be 
requisite as your individual share, in order to make 
your pastors and their families happy. Where, 
then, are your feelings as men, where your obe- 
dience and gratitude as Christians, if such small 
sacrifices as their comfort requires are refused ? 
‘Is it a great thing, that they who sow unto you 
spiritual things,’ should be permitted to ‘reap’ one 
handful of ‘your carnal things’ when so great a 
portion of them is suffered to run to waste ? 
“Permit us to ask you, if every other person is 
entitled to recompense for his labor, by what law, 
either of God or man, are we bound to labor, we 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 283 


say not without an equitable compensation, but 
without even a sufficiency for present subsistence ? 
Is labor in spiritual things the only kind of 
Jabor which deserves no recompense, and for 
which it is presumptuous to demand it? Does a 
person, by becoming a minister of the Gospel, for- 
feit the rights which belong to him asa man? Or 
does the law of God condemn in his case as a proof 
of a worldly spirit, that regard to his temporal pro- 
vision which in every other man is a matter of 
prudence and an act of duty? Weare bound to 
warn you, that ‘if any provide not for his own, and 
especially for those of his own house, he has denied 
the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’ But must 
the matter be reversed when the case is ours? 
Must we violate the plainest dictates of duty to 
our families, in order to be brought to act a part 
becoming Christian ministers? If we possess pro- 
perty of our own, must we expend it, without 
necessity, in your service? must we render you 
dependent on our generosity, and at the same time 
rob our families of their rights? Or, if we have 
none, as is generally the case, must we, because 
you are worldly-minded, on pain of being reckoned 
so ourselves, suffer ourselves and our families to 
starve? No. We serve a good Master, who 
never exacted our services in the Gospel on such 
hard terms. When He sent us to labor among 
you, He committed us and our families to your 
protection. We are not, as some men talk, de- 
pendent on your charity for what you please to 
bestow ; we have a claim upon your justice for 
what is equitable. We are entitled, in the name of 
the God whom we serve, to demand bread for our- 


284 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


selves and the children whom He hath graciously 
given us. 

“We do not presume to state precisely what the 
provision is which it is your duty to bestow. This 
must be regulated by the circumstances of the 
times, the place of our residence, the necessities of 
our families, and the measure of your ability; for 
that provision may be liberal at one period, or in 
one situation, which would be altogether inadequate 
in another. We desire not to be elevated toa rank 
in society above that in which our station entitles 
us to move; but to enjoy, in our proper station, 
what will place us above the fears of want and the 
anxieties of care; what will furnish us with the 
necessaries, and some of the comforts of life ; what 
will enable us to educate our children, be just to 
the world, hospitable to the stranger, and kind to 
the poor. Were we placed among a people so few 
and so poor as to be unable to furnish us with 
comforts, otherwise than by depriving themselves of 
necessaries, we trust that we would be reconciled 
to subsist on the homeliest fare till Providence 
should otherwise provide for us; but we are not 
convinced that this is our duty when we labor to 
hundreds, many of whom possess, if not affluence, 
a moderate competency of worldly goods. 

“Sit down, you who have any skill in figures, 
and satisfy yourselves at leisure, whether we com- 
plain without reason. Place our stipends in one 
column, and our necessary expenditure in the 
other. Value such articles as our manses require in 
order to be decently furnished ; stock our libraries 
with such a moderate store of books as justice to 
you renders it necessary we should possess ; make 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 285 


us such an allowance for suitable dress for ourselves 
and families as will prevent us from being ashamed ; 
give us wages for servants to attend to our house- 
hold affairs ; pay our charges for travelling to pres- 
byteries and synods, and to assist brethren in the 
dispensation of divine ordinances ; add the amount 
of the public and local taxes which we are obliged 
to pay; grant us a little, that we may occasionally 
entertain a friend as becomes our station, and may 
not shut our door against the strangers who expect 
to be hospitably received; and entrust us with 
somewhat to enable us, as we are enjoined, to set 
an example to our flocks and to the world of com- 
passion to the poor, of public spirit, and of readi- 
ness for every good work. When you have cast up 
the sum and deducted it from the stipends which 
we receive, inform us how much remains, we say, 
not to hoard, for the future, or to dissipate in 
luxury, but to give bread to our families, and educa- 
tion to children whom we cannot endow. We anti- 
cipate the surprise you must feél, that our spirits 
have not been crushed ere now by the difficulties 
of our situation; and you will give us credit for 
economy, if we are not in debt. We tremble for 
ourselves, lest, if we are not ‘fed with food conve- 
nient for us, we should acquire mean habits un- 
worthy of our dignity and our station as ministers ; 
lest we should contract vices which will blast our 
hitherto fair reputation, and cause religion to be 
‘wounded in the house of its friends; lest we 
should become involved in debts which we are un- 
able to pay; lest we should sink into a state of 
mental dejection, which will incapacitate us for the 
discharge of our spiritual duties ; lest, in fine, when 


286 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


old age overtakes us, or disease seizes on us, we 
should murmur at the good providence of God, and 
be unwilling to ‘die at his commandment,’ because 
we must leave a family, young, uneducated, unpro- 
vided for, on the mercy of persons who were un- 
kind to us while we lived, and will forget us and 
our widow and orphans after we are dead. 

““Some of you, perhaps, excuse yourselves for 
the neglect of duty to your minister hitherto by 
professing ignorance of his necessities. You never 
observed anything in his appearance, or in that of 
his family, which indicated want, and you never 
heard him complain. If, indeed, he has suffered, 
affecting cheerfulness while he was burdened in 
spirit, and making a show of plenty while in private 
he was struggling with want, forgive him this wrong. 
But was it kind in you never to reflect on his cir- 
cumstances, or to wait, if you suspected them, til. 
he should be constrained to ask relief? A favor 
derives much of its value from the grace with which 
it is bestowed. Your unsolicited attention to his 
comfort would have had a double relish, as afford-- 
ing not only a relief to him from his embarrass- 
ments, but an unequivocal proof of your love. 

“Recollect that if every article of life is dearer 
to you than formerly, as well as to your minister, 
it is he that suffers, not you. Your wages, your 
profits, have increased with the increase of charge. 
while his stipend continues the same. He who 
gave five shillings per annum for the support of the 
Gospel when he earned only one shilling per day, 
must be equally able to give ten when he earns 
two, and fifteen when he earns three ; and when he 
does so, he does not in reality give more, You are 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 287 


able in general to give, not only in proportion to 
the rise of your wages and profits but even in a 
higher proportion. Though your own living costs 
you more than in former times, you are not poorer, 
you are richer than when it cost you less. And 
surely, if you are able to provide not only the same 
articles of life, and the same kind of clothing, but 
both in greater abundance and of superior quality, 
it will not be an easy matter to convince an impar- 
tial person that you are not able to raise the stipend 
of your minister to an equality in respect of value 
to what it formerly was ; and even to augment it, 
that, along with you, he may enjoy a greater por- 
tion of the conveniences and comforts of life. 
‘“Remember that your minister is only a stipen- 
diary during life or good behavior. The stipend 
expires with himself. It is not enough, therefore, 
that he enjoys barely a sufficiency for present com- 
fortable subsistence. What is to become of his 
family when he dies? Must not this thought rush 
often into the mind of the most spiritually-minded 
man, and can he feel easy when his reflections are 
irresistibly forced into the following train? ‘My 
stipend has at no period exceeded my expenditure ; 
my utmost economy has not enabled me to lay up 
anything in store ; when I die, my congregation, 
among whom I have labored these many years, 
will treat my family as other congregations have 
treated the families of their ministers—they will 
perhaps defray the charges of my funeral ; they 
will pay up to my mourning widow, or, if already 
paid, not demand back from her the stipend of the 
current half-year, for the whole of which death did 
not permit me to labor; they will boast of their 


288 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


generosity for having done so much beyond their 
obligations, and while they talk with respect of my 
memory, will .eave my widow and my orphans to 
starve.” 

An adequate provision for the ministers of reli- 
gion, such as God made under the Jewish, and Dr. 
Peddie, following in the steps of St. Paul, pleads for 
under the Christian economy, is so closely and cer- 
tainly connected with the power of the pulpit and 
the welfare of precious souls—with the grand pur- 
poses of Christ’s death and the progress of his 
kingdom, that I regard it as one of the greatest 
questions of the day. Having been obliged to re- 
sign pastoral work, and no longer depending for my 
support on its remuneration, I feel the more free to 
press this matter on the Christian public; and 
for this purpose, since it was thought likely to 
serve the end in view, I will now proceed to draw 
on the substance of an address which I delivered to 
the General Assembly of the Free Church when I 
had the honor to preside over its deliberations. 

The calamity which I stand in dread of, and 
which is, next to the withdrawal of the divine bless- 
ing, the greatest a church can suffer, is, that the 
rising talent, genius, and energy of our country may 
leave the ministry of the Gospel for other pro- 
fessions. ‘‘A scandalous maintenance,” Matthew 
Henry says, “ makes a scandalous ministry.” That 
adage I would proclaim in the public ear, and press 
especially on the office- bearers of the church, having 
that confidence in their sense of justice as to feel 
that there is not one in the house but will rejoice 
that I have taken up this topic. If “‘a scandalous 
maintenance makes a scandalous ministry,” I'll give 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 289 


you another sentence equally true,—“ The poverty 
of the manse will develop itself in the poverty of 
the pulpit.” I have no doubt about that ; and that is 
the evil implore youto avert. Genteel poverty !— 
may you never know it !—genteel poverty, to which 
some doom themselves, but to which ministers are 
doomed, is one of the greatest evils under the sun. 
Give me liberty to wear frieze, and I will thank no 
man for a black coat—give me liberty to rear my 
sons as laborers, and my daughters as domestic 
servants, and the manse may enjoy the same cheer- 
ful contentment that sheds sunlight on many a 
pious and lowly home. But to place a man in cir- 
cumstances where he is expected to be generous 
and hospitable, to open his hand as wide as his 
heart to the poor, to give his family a liberal educa- 
tion, to breed them up according to what they call 
genteel life,—to place a man in these circumstances, 
and deny him the means of doing so, is enough, but 
for the hope of heaven, to embitter existence. In 
the dread of debt, in many daily mortifications,— 
meeting, perhaps, some old acquaintance whom he 
dare not ask to his table, lest his more prudent wife 
should frown upon his extravagance,—in harassing 
fears of what shall befall wife and children when his 
head lies in the grave, a man of cultivated mind 
and delicate sensibilities has trials to bear more 
painful than the privations of the poor. Though 
in pleading for a better provision for ministers of 
God’s word, I can say with Paul, ‘‘I have used none 
of these things, neither do I write these things that 
they may be so done to me,” let me say, I have 
tasted of others’ bitter cup. It isabitter cup; and 
my heart bleeds for brethren who have never told 
19 


290 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


their sorrows—concealing under their cloak the fox 
that gnaws at their vitals. 

I do not altogether blame the people; I believe 
with the poet, that more ill is done for want of 
thought than for want of heart. The full truth has 
never been told in the public ear as I would tell it 
now. The livings, I do not say of this Church only, 
but of the ministers of all Churches, are inadequate ; 
and I should rejoice if my words went forth on the 
wings of the press to do good to United Presby- 
terian, Congregational, and also Established Church 
ministers. I rejoice to see the latter getting an 
addition from their teinds. They feel the same 
discomforts as others ; nor are they sustained and 
cheered by our hopes. I feel confident that the 
rising tide of liberality will by-and-by float us over 
the bar into better and happier waters ; but they 
can hardly expect from parliament what I look for 
with the utmost confidence from the enlarged and 
enlightened liberality of our people. 

I know some do not like to hear of these mat- 
ters ; but those who like least, need most to hear 
of them. Some—not many, I hope—are like an 
honest man belonging to Aberdeenshire (I tell the 
story as I heard it), who, on being asked what he 
thought of the Frec Church, replied, ‘‘Oh, I admire 
her principles, but I detest her schemes!” But 
whether people will hear, or whether they will for- 
bear, let me now state two or three ways in which 
the claims of ministers are evaded. I will give you 
cases—these are best remembered. 

In my native town, long years ago, there lived an 
excellent Seceder minister. His son was appointed 
his assistant and successor. The congregation gave 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 291 


the father £100 a-year, and the son £80—a living 
better in those days than most ministers enjoy in 
these—a provision very creditable to the good old 
Seceders. At length the old man died, and his 
people met to consider what stipend should be 
allotted the son, now their sole pastor. The ques- 
tion was not whether they would allow him £180-. 
which it ought to have been, seeing that they had 
proved themselves able to do so; but the matter, 
assuming a less generous shape, was whether they 
would give the son the £100 the father had re- 
ceived, or keep him at the £80. Well, the question 
was put; whereupon an honest weaver rose, and 
declared himself clear for keeping the incumbent at 
the lowest figure. He saw no reason why ministers 
should receive more for weaving sermons than he 
for weaving webs—alleging in proof of the advan- 
tage ofa poor stipend that the church never had 
better, nor so good, ministers as when ‘‘ they went 
about in sheepskins and goatskins, and lived in 
caves and holes of the earth.” If any sympathize 
with the weaver, I answer that I have an insuper- 
able objection to “caves and holes”—they create 
damp ; and, secondly, as to the habiliments, it will 
be time enough to take up that question when our 
people are prepared to walk Princes-street with 
us—not in this antique Moderator’s dress, but in 
the more primitive and antiquated fashion of goat- 
skins with the horns on. So I dispase of such 
wretched evasions. 

I pass on to a second, expressed in a remark 
which looks very pious; and is all the worse for 
that. It was made by a lady to the wife of an 
excellent minister, who, as many have been obliged 


292 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


to do, kept boarders to eke out a living that some 
of the merchant princes in his congregation could 
have paid out of their own pocket, and never missed 
it. This lady, rustling in silks, and in a blaze of 
jewels, went to pay a visit to her minister’s wife— 
more a lady than herself, with the exception of the 
dress. She condoled with her on their straitened 
circumstances, and looking into the pale, careworn 
face of the excellent woman, said, as she turned up 
the white of her eyes, ‘‘ But, my dear, your reward 
is above!” From the bloodless lips of some poor 
sinner in a cold. unfurnished garret, where the man 
of God, facing fever and pestilence, has gone to 
smooth a dying pillow and minister consolation to 
life’s last dark hour, I have been thankful to hear 
the words, ‘‘ Your reward is above,’—but from silks 
and satins, how disgusting ! the vilest cant, enough 
to make religion stink in the nostrils of the world ! 
Does that saying pay the minister’s stipend? Will 
it pay his accounts? Fancy him going to his baker 
or butcher, and instead of paying down money, 
turning up the white of his eyes to say, “ Your 
reward is above.” I fancy they would reply, “ Oh, 
no, my good sir, that does not pay the bill!” Well, 
I say what does not pay tradesmen’s bills does not 
pay minister’s stipends. 

There is a story much to the purpose hete, told 
of Christmas Evans, who, during a large part of his 
pastorate in Anglesea, received for his labors only 
417 per annum, and never more than £30—a 
miserable support for a man who gave himself up 
with singleness of heart to the work of the ministry. 
His biographer, himself a Welshman, says, “ It 
must be numbered among the anomalies of Welsh 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 293 


religious life, that it combines an insatiable appetite 
for sermons with a marvellous disregard for the 
temporal comfort of the preacher.” It is a pity 
that this anomaly is not peculiar to Welsh religious 
life. On one occasion a woman said to Mr. Evans, 
as he came out of the pulpit, ‘Well, Christmas 
Evans, dach, I hope you will be paid at the resur- 
rection ; you have given us a wonderful sermon.”— 
“Yes, yes, Shan /fach,” was his quick reply, ‘‘no 
doubt of that ; dut what am I to do till T get there? 
And there is the old white mare that carries me; 
what will she do? for her there will be no resurrec- 
tion.” He might, it has been remarked, have said 
more, and with great justice. He might have added, 
“Yes, yes, I know that for my labors and sacrifices 
I shall be paid there. But what will you do? 
What pay will you receive then for your stinginess 
now?” That is the question which should come 
home to the hearts of ail who combine an appetite 
for the labors of the servant of God with a marvel- 
lous disregard for his temporal wants and com- 
forts. There are two ways in which congregations 
sometimes display this niggardliness. (1.) In their 
shabby contributions to their minister during the 
days of his activity. They take all they can get 
from him, and give as little as possible in return. 
(2.) In their miserable provision for him in the days 
of his infirmity and old age. Can anything be 
more heartless than the pittance on which he is 
often left to starve? The pretext of leaving him 
to be repaid at the resurrection, as in the case of 
Evans, is a barefaced hypocrisy, which must be 
utterly abominable to God. 

There is a third way of evading this duty I want 


204 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the Christian public to look at. I have heard it 
myself. It is this: Ministers should not be rich! 
I am not seeking to make ministers rich. I have 
no ambition to be rich. But it is a sweet thing to 
be able to pour blessings into an empty cup; and I 
want to know why I should be deprived of that 
pleasure more than others? Have not Ila heart as 
well as other men? Have not I pity as well as 
other men? Do not I delight in hearing and re- 
ceiving the widow’s blessing as well as other men? 
More than that, I ask what reasons there are against 
ministers being rich which do not apply with equal, 
perhaps with greater, force to others? Who dare 
say that ministers would make a worse use of 
money than others? Are those who have received 
a liberal education, who hold a sacred office, who 
occupy a public position, whose piety should be 
fired at the altars where they minister, and whose 
sympathies are daily moved by the misery they see, 
more likely than other men to make a bad use of 
money? Was Agur’s prayer, ‘Give me neither 
poverty nor riches,” made only for them? I tell 
him who tells me that ministers should not be rich, 
that that prayer is as fit for his lips as for mine. 
Whether ministers are less likely to make a good 
and noble use of riches than others is a question 
which I answer by pointing to the Church of Eng- 
land. In her only do you find many men of 
private fortunes holding a holy office ; and is it not 
a fact, one most honorable to her clergy, that in 
building schools and paying teachers, in erecting 
churches and paying curates, in other benevolent 
and Christian agencies, a very large number of the 
ministers of the Church of England pay as much 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 295 


out of their private fortunes as they get annually 
from their livings? Show me the class—bankers, 
merchants, physicians, farmers—that does the like. 

All Task is that ministers should have such a 
maintenance as shall relieve them from evils that I 
shall call poverty. Poverty in a good cause is a 
noble thing. Let none, therefore, stagger at the 
word ; nor, in such a cause as ours, at the thing. 
I have no sympathy with the man who quarrelled 
with the word foor in the inscription proposed for 
Mr. Pitt’s monument ; which was something to this 
effect—that millions had passed through his hands, 
and that he died poor. The noblest thing ever said 
about a statesman! But this gentleman, of very 
squeamish sensibility, said, ‘‘Oh, I don’t like that 
word foor. Should it not be, that though millions 
had passed through his hands, he died in emdbar- 
rassed circumstances?” Still poverty is an evil; 
and what I plead for is, that my brethren should 
have livings adequate to their position in society, 
and adequate to the expenses in which they are 
necessarily involved. 

But there are worse evils behind than any I have 
yet exposed. The result of the inadequate livings 
of our ministers is, or, as sure as the tide will flow 
to-morrow, will be—unless the Christian people 
take steps to prevent it—that the rising talent and 
genius of our country will go to other professions ; 
leaving the pulpit to weakness or fanaticism. That 
were an unspeakable calamity. I would hold out 
no lure to avarice, nor tempt any to enter the 
Church by the hope of wealth ; but I wish no man 
to be deterred from it by the certainty of poverty. 
That stands as a barrier at this moment between 


296 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the Church, and the higher and middle classes of 
society ; and I ask you to remove it. How many 
noble, large-hearted, Christ-loving office-bearers 
have we in our Church! yet I wish to know how 
many of these gentlemen engaged in Glasgow in 
commerce, orin Edinburgh in the honorable pursuits 
of the law, or other learned professions, are at this 
moment training one son for the ministry? They 
give us their silver. I want their sons—a gift more 
precious than their silver. And why, but that the 
pulpits of the Church may present a fair represen- 
tation of its position as well as of its piety? No 
man will suspect me of undervaluing the humble 
classes of the people. Who does, does me a cruel 
wrong. If I have lived for one thing more than 
another, it has been to rescue and raise the very 
poorest of the poor. I stand by the people, and 
believe the humbler classes in their religious and 
other views, to be sounder—take them all in all— 
than any other. Some of my most valued and 
best respected brethren, ornaments to this Church 
and to their country, have sprung from a humble 
origin; and should the Church of Christ lose 
the working classes, she loses, under God, her best 
support. 

Nevertheless, to me it seems most important and 
desirable that the ministry of the Church should 
represent the position as well as the piety of its 
membership ; that there should be a {fair proportion 
of what we call well-born and well-bred men in the 
ministry, to give it a tone removed from vulgarity, 
or that thing, still more offensive, called vulgar gen- 
tility. The humbler classes in our Church have in- 
deed no reason to fear that the upper will betray 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 207 


their interests. The men that went out to the hill- 
side in the days of the Covenant, and preached in 
the face of Claverhouse’s dragoons, were many, if 
not most of them, what are called ‘‘ well-born men.” 
The Erskines and Moncrieffs, the first seceders, 
were also men of family and position. Well, what 
I desire is, to see all classes in our pulpits—the 
piety, and genius, and talent of every class. But at 
this moment you cannot reckon on youths frem the 
middle class coming forward tothe ministry. Those 
who give their gold and silver to the treasury of the 
Church, are not giving their sons to its ministry. 
Such is the fact ; account for it how you may. I 
for one am not astonished at it. Have not I heard 
ministers themselves say, that, having felt so keenly 
the poverty and difficulties of their position, the 
last profession they would rear a son to was 
the Church? I don’t sympathize with that. 
At the same time, I cannot greatly censure either 
them, or our laity. It is easy to understand how a 
devout man should say, ‘‘I am at liberty to conse- 
crate myself to Christ and peverty ; but am I at 
uiberty, in the case of that boy who has given evi- 
dence of genius, and some promise of piety, and 
whom a turn of my hand, under God's providence, 
may turn this way or that,—am I at liberty, at an 
age when he is not capable of fully judging for him- 
self, to devote him to a life of privations, especially 
when he may serve the Lord in employments that 
involve no particular hardships ?” 

That is a grave question ; nor cin it be doubted 
that it is the poverty of ministers which keeps our 
intelligent and pious laymen from doing what Iam 
anxious they should feel free to do—give their sons, 


298 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the best and brightest of them, to the pulpit. I want 
this “‘stone of offence” removed. People talk with 
senseless horror of the bait of riches, the temptation 
of wealth ; but let them think of this, that they do 
not get rid of the temptations of wealth by a mean 
and shabby stipend,—nothing of the kind. A living 
of £100 or £150 is as great a bait to a peasant’s 
son as one four times that amount were to the son 
of a manufacturer, or merchant, or lawyer, or phy- 
sician. The only difference is, that if people are to 
be moved by mercenary influences to enter the 
ministry, witha low stipend you draw the whole of 
your clergy from the lower classes of the people. 
But that would prove no gain. Low livings, there- 
fore, afford no security against men seeking to enter 
the ministry from low motives ; indeed, in the only 
case recorded in Scripture where a man betook him- 
self to the priest’s office from mercenary motives, 
the stipend was a very mean one—but ten shekels 
of silver, his meat, and a suit of clothes. What I 
plead for is such a provision, and only such a pro- 
vision, for the ministers of religion as shall deliver 
them from the painful trials and narrow pinching 
circumstances under which many at this hour are 
secretly groaning. 

Let me address the wealthy members of our 
Church—those who hesitate about giving their sons 
to the ministry, from a very natural dread of the pri- 
vations which would be their doom. I say, “‘ You 
have the remedy in your own hands. I tell you 
kindly but plainly that you are without excuse.” 
I can well understand an affectionate and prudent 
father saying, ‘I may give my money, but am I at 
liberty to give my son, to the Lord; and so cast 


4 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 209 


him without his full censent on a sea of troubles ?” 
But there is no occasion he should ever know the 
troubles you dread. You can insure him against 
them. Do not hundreds of wealthy and worldly 
men who send their sons into the army give them 
an allowance sufficient to save them from the 
poverty of their inadequate pay? and why should 
not our wealthy and Christian men do the same for 
sons in the ministry? There is the remedy as 
I have seen it in a will which bequeathed a large 
share to the son who, having entered the ministry, 
had embraced a profession the most sacred, but 
yet the worst paid. Ifa youth devotes himself to 
the ministry, willing to give himself to poverty for 
the cause of Christ, I say to tne father, Let him 
have a Benjamin’s share; give him a double 
portion! Thus you can lay the ghost of poverty, 
and save your son from difficulties, and penury, 
and lifelong trials. 

Another thing I venture to suggest. Why is it, 
I ask, that wealthy congregations do not give their 
ministers livings adequate to the position they 
occupy, and the expenses in which they are neces- 
sarily involved? The evil of small stipends 
throughout the Church is one it will take years to 
mend. But why do congregations which have 
numbers and wealth sufficient to provide their 
minister with an income such as his position requires, 
and his talents entitle him to, not do so? Why 
should talent and genius not insure the same 
measure of competency in the Church that they do 
in every other profession? Why should he who 
brings the richest gifts and graces to the highest 
office, be the only manso inadequately remunerated, 


300 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


that, when his coffin is paid, his family have nothing 
left, and an appeal must be made to the generosity 
of the public? I admire the gerierosity that 
answers the appeal, but would admire more the 
justice that rendered it unnecessary. I see that an 
elder in Glasgow has proposed that there should be 
three or four livings in Edinburgh, three or four in 
Glasgow, and elsewhere throughout the Church, up 
to the mark of £1,000. I amnotastonished at the 
proposal. It is every way wise. I can lay my 
hands on men in the Church who, if they had gone 
to the Bar, would have risen to the top of it ; and 
not £500, but £5,000, or more, would have been 
their yearly income. 

Under God, three grand powers are now moving 
the world,—the press, the platform, and the pulpit. 
I have no jealousy of the press or platform; but 
should they be allowed to monopolize the talent 
and genius of our country, it will be bad for the 
country, and bad for the Church of Christ. Alas 
for the day, when pulpits are proverbial for dulness, 
the Sabbath is a weariness, and the greatest of all 
professions has the smallest of men to fill it! When 
the power of moulding public opinion departs from 
the pulpit to pass to the press and platform, “the 
sceptre shall depart from Judah.” I call on people 
of every denomination to avert such a grave 
calamity, and beware how they starve the pulpit 
into weakness and contempt. Would to God that 
these words entered the hearts of pious parents, and 
enlisted for the ministry of the Gospel youths dis- 
tinguished alike for genius and piety! Why should 
not our Christian youth come forward to embrace 
this noblest, though meanwhile poorest, of all pros 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 301 


fessions? Some years ago, leaving titles, estates, 
luxurious mansions, kind fathers, mothers, sisters, 
brothers, and blooming brides, many threw them- 
- selves on the shores of the Black Sea, to face frost 
and famine, pestilence and iron showers of death, 
under the walls of Sebastopol! And shall piety 
blush before patriotism? Shall Jesus Christ call in 
vain for less costly sacrifices—either of money or oi 
men? Let those whom Providence has enriched, 
some with silver and some with sons, remember 
the touching question one wrote beneath a figure of 
our Lord stretched bleeding on the cross, “‘ THIS 
THOU HAST DONE FOR ME, WHAT SHALL I DO 
FOR THEE?” 


HIS GOVERNMENT. 


Where a forest of masts rises along the docks 
of some great commercial seaport, or watched 
from the shores of the estuary by which, home- 
ward or outward bound, they are perpetually 
passing, what a wonderful variety of vessels we 
see! the origin of all the fallen tree, or shape- 
less log, astride which man first ventured on the 
treacherous water. Some, hugging the land and 
creeping from port to port, are coasters of small 
burden; others, employed on long and distant 
voyages, float like leviathans on the deep,—their 
masts the tallest pines, their sails spread out to the 
gentle breeze, a cloud of snowy canvas: some 
bearing them to other countries or bringing them 
to ours, are laden with the fruits of peace ; others, 
huge floating castles, are trod by combatants, and, 
with cannon looking grimly out at every porthole, 


302 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


are armed for war. Some are constructed ol 
wood, others of iron: some catching the wind in 
their wings move onward by help of sails, others, 
beating the water and leaving a foaming wake 
behind them, by the power of fire. But though, 
differing in size, form, material, purpose, or moving 
power, they are unlike in these respects, they are 
alike in this, each has a compass, an anchor, and 
ahelm. Possessed by all, these can be dispensed 
with by none; it being impossible otherwise to make 
a successful voyage or avoid shipwreck—their fate 
who find in their moving home a coffin, and in the 
sea a moving grave. 

On turning to the shore, its inhabitants, whether 
they dwell in town or country, present a corre- 
sponding, and even greater, variety of classes. Be 
they rich or poor, sitting solitary or in families, 
crowded in busy towns or lonely shepherds in quiet 
uplands, dwelling in huts or palaces, parents or 
children, masters or servants, magistrates or sub- 
jects, princes or peasants, kings or commons, the 
sheep of Christ’s flock or its pastors, the Word of 
God is the one thing they have, or should have, in 
common—that book being as indispensable to them 
for a good life and a happy death, as compass, 
helm, and anchor to every ship that ventures on 
the sea. Divine in its origin, this wonderful and 
precious volume is so universal in its application, 
that none can say, ‘I have no need of thee!” 
Equally adapted to all classes, all countries, all 
times, all circumstances, all days of the week, all 
ages of the world, and all ages of human life, from 
the child, tottering by the side of a cradle to the 
old man tottering on the edge ofa grave, we cannot 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 303 


imagine a condition of life in which a man will not 
find instructions there to teach him how to fill it. 
There “‘in precept upon precept, precept upon pre- 
' cept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and 
there a little,” all men may read the principles that 
should guide them—and these set forth so plainly 
that he whorunnethmay read. But besides these, 
the finger-posts, as I may call them, that stand by 
the roadside to point the way, we have in Scripture 
characters—in this, that, and the other man—pat- 
terns to copy, living guides who go before us, say- 
ing, ‘‘ This is the way, walk ye init.” In this, its 
universal aptitude and application, the Bible may 
be compared to the atmosphere, which, descending 
into the depths of the lowest valleys, and rising 
above the summits of the highest Alps, holds the 
whole world in its embraces ; or to the great ocean, 
which washes every shore on earth, and encircles 
in its arms alike the largest continents and the 
tiniest rock that lifts its head out of the waste of 
waters. 

Wo case affords a better illustration of this than 
that of Samuel—those who fill the highest positions 
in society, and all indeed who, whatever their posi- 
tion be, exercise authority over others, finding in 
him a living example of a ruler, and how to rule. 
Light of the cottage, the Word of God is of all 
books the best fitted to be the light of the palace 
also. I don’t know that it is ; but by none should 
it be more frequently read, and more devoutly 
studied than by kings. So thought Dr. Coxe, 
Dean of Christ’s Church, Oxford, and tutor to the 
prince, afterwards Edward VI. Writing of hir 
pupil he says, “‘As concerning my lord and dez' 


304 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


scholar, it is kindly done of you to desire so gently 
to hear from him and of his proceedings. We can 
now read, and, God be thanked, sufficiently. He 
understandeth and can frame well his three con- 
cords of grammar, and hath made already forty or 
fifty pretty Latin verses, and is now ready to enter 
into Cato, to some proper and profitable fables of 
4Esop, and other wholesome and godly lessons that 
shall be devised for him. Every day in the mass- 
time he readeth a portion of Solomon’s Proverbs for 
the exercise of his reading, wherein he delighteth - 
much; and learneth there how good it is to give 
ear unto discipline, to fear God, to keep God’s com- 
mandments, to beware of strange and wanton 
women, to be obedient to father and mother, to be 
thankful to him that telleth him of his faults.” 
Other books—the works of great men and pos- 
sessed of great merit—have been written for the 
use of princes in training for a throne ; but in pre- 
ference to all such, were we a prince’s tutor, we 
should select the Bible ; and for a pattern for rulers 
him whose name stands at the head of this chapter. 
America boasts her Washington; England her 
Hampden ; Scotland her Wallace; Greece and 
Rome their patriots or patriot-kings ; but among 
the few illustrious men whose deeds shine in the 
annals and whose names are embalmed in the heart 
of nations, where, in all history, sacred or profane. 
is there one so eminently fitted to rule as Samuel 
—who presents such a remarkable combination of 
mental power, the purest patriotism, and the highest 
piety? 

He was a patriotic ruler. 

1. His object was not the possession of power— 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 305 


that for which so many kings and statesmen have 
had recourse to the meanest devices ; have trodden 
the foulest paths ; and, casting all honor to the 
winds, have abandoned the principles, and betrayed 
the friends of their life. How basely did Henry IV. 
desert the sacred cause for which, his white plume 
dancing in the thick of the fight, he had often led 
his followers to battle! And from him who em- 
braced Popery to win Paris, and, with its gay 
capital, the kingdom and crown of France, to such 
as by bribery have purchased meaner offices, what 
sacrifices of conscience, and virtue, and truth, have 
been offered at the shrine of power! The crimes 
which some have committed to gain it have been 
without a parallel, unless those which others have 
committed to retain it. Unlike that grand old 
Roman who threw up the helm of the state and 
retired to plough his paternal acres, how many has 
the world seen clinging to power as a drowning 
man to a plank; and to retain possession of it, 
resorting to the most dishonorable and vilest 
means! For this purpose, once and again the 
sword of Joab was plunged into the heart of a 
rival; to prop up his throne, Charles I., in Straf- 
ford, gave the neck of a devoted friend to the 
headsman’s axe; to secure their places and ap- 
pease an angry country, a British ministry cast an 
admiral of the fleet to the mob, and hanged him up 
before the sun; and Richelieu, a cardinal of the 
church, and chief minister of France, arranged that 
her armies should suffer an ignominious defeat— 
scrupling not, rather than that he should lose his 
place, that thousands of his gallant countrymen 
should lose their lives, and cement with their blood 
20 


306 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the tottering fabric of his power. No man can 
have intelligently read the history of the past, or 
watched the events of his own day and the course 
of many who, amid its shifting scenes, have played 
their part on the stage of public life, without the 
painful conviction that there are few things in the 
world more rare than true patriotism; and few 
positions where a good man finds it more difficult 
to preserve his integrity than amid the temptations 
of politics and wiles of statesmanship. The arena 
there resembles more a sheet of ice than the com- 
pact, sandy floor on which the old Greeks and 
Romans met to fight for laurel crowns and victory. 
In the crooked policy they have pursued to gain 
or to retain place and power, what base things have 
great men done, and what bad things good men! 
—sometimes constraining us, as we read or hear of 
them, to ask, ‘‘ What is man ?” or to exclaim with 
David, ‘‘ How are the mighty fallen; the weapons 
of war, how are they perished !” 

A finer contrast to the general character of the 
princes and statesmen, and, whether they occupied 
a high or a low place, of the rulers of this world, we 
cannot imagine than that which Samuel presents. 
Place, honor, and power sought him; not he 
them. He became the judge of Israel, or its ruler, 
at the call of God; and when, without respect to 
his gray hairs and long years of honorable, suc- 
cessful service, an ungrateful country called him to 
resign his office, like the sun which looks largest at 
its setting, he never seems so great, so grand, as in 
the last scenes of his public life. It had been a 
sublime, though painful, spectacle to see this great 
man, wounded by ingratitude and smarting under 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 307 


the stings of those he had nursed in his bosom, un- 
complainingly, simply, cheerfully lay down his 
office. He did more than that. Remonstrating 
with the people, he warned them of the evils a king 
would bring in his train; and thereby exposed 
himself to unjust suspicions, and the foul tongues 
of many who would represent him as clinging to 
the possession of power rather than seeking the 
good of his country. And when Saul at length 
was fixed on as his successor, see how noble he 
bore himself to the man who was to thrust him 
from his seat! There is no more magnanimous 
thing in history. Rising above the weaknesses of 
our nature, he received Saul with the utmost cour- 
tesy, and treated him even with paternal kindness. 
Casting at him no jealous eye, far less the deadly 
javelin he cast at David, Samuel resigned the 
sceptre with more than the dignity of a king, and 
all the self-denial of a Christian. Like a father 
who instructs a beloved child, he counselled, he 
advised, he warned him; and leaving worldly 
rivals to thwart rather than help their successors, 
to rejoice over their errors rather than lament 
them, he clung to Saul. He supported his autho- 
rity so long as he could; and when at length the 
sins of his successor parted them forever, Samuel 
retired sad and sorrowful to his home in Ramah. 
Unlike those statesmen who are driven from place 
only to brood over their wrongs, and stir up the 
people to recall them, he lamented the errers and 
bewailed the fate of him to make way for whom he 
himself had been thrust from power and honor. 
I cannot fancy a nobler or more touching picture 
than this venerable, grand old man, who had been 


308 Ss STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the safety and honor of the commonwealth, sitting 
in his house forgetting all his personal wrongs in 
grief for the public calamity, and allowing the 
evening of his days to be darkened with sorrow for 
the crimes and misfortunes of Saul. If ever breast 
was pure of selfish ambition and the love of power, 
it was his who exposed himself to this honorable 
reproach—to whom the Lord appeared, saying— 
““ How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have 
rejected him ?” 

2. His object was not-his own personal aggran- 
dizement. “‘L’état, cest moi” (“The State, it is 
I”), said Louis XIV. to one who happened to speak 
in his presence of the interests of the State. A 
striking picture that of one who, though called “the 
great,” was an incarnation of the worst passions of 
human nature—of selfishness, pride, heartless 
cruelty, insatiable ambition, and abominable lust ! 
—a truer picture, though drawn by his own hand, 
than any left by Bossuet, or Massillon, or the 
other flatterers of a bloody tyrant and ruthless per- 
secutor of God’s heritage. What sacrifices have 
been offered at the feet of this idol, 1! To gratify 
the ambition, the avarice, the lust, the vengeance, 
and the pride of kings, of ministers of state and 
other rulers, the interests of commerce and industry 
have been ruined; beautiful countries desolated ; 
the liberties of mankind trodden under foot; na- 
tions impoverished; happy homes turned into 
smoking ruins, and peaceful fields into scenes of 
blood and slaughter. We meet with no such 
scenes under the rule of Samuel. We hear neither 
the wail of widows, nor the shout of battle, nor any 
prophet who wrings his hands, crying, ‘“‘O that my 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 309 


head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of 
tears, that I might weep day and night for the 
slain of the daughter of my people.” Unlike 
those that had preceded, or were to follow, 
the sword slept in its scabbard all the days of 
Samuel—that great battle excepted which inaugu- 
rated his reign, and was won by his prayers. 
Happy days, these, for Israel, when, each man sit- 
ting at his cottage door, under his own vine and 
fig-tree, with none to make him afraid, the people 
rested from arms; enjoying in their homes the 
security, and reaping in their fields the fruits, ot 
peace ! 

Under his government—Samuel himself the 
highest example of it—piety flourished ; the stream 
of justice ran pure; the rights of all classes were 
respected ; private property was safe ; and the public 
burdens, pressing lightly, were easily borne by a 
prosperous people. No taxes to carry on such wars 
as David’s, or maintain the costly splendor of Solo- 
mon’s reign, were imposed onthe nation. Saul was 
perpetually fighting ; in the extension of his king- 
dom, or the suppression of intestine commotions, 
the sword was seldom out of David’s hand; while, 
through the boundless expenses of Solomon’s harem, 
and royal parade, and public buildings, and volup- 
tuous as well as refined indulgences, the peace of 
his reign must have proved more burdensome to 
the country than the wars of his predecessors : and 
I can fancy, when old men described the happy and 
quiet life they led in the good days of Samuel, how 
“many felt that when their fathers clamored for a 
king, on that occasion, as old Bishop Latimer said 
of another, the vox populi was rather the vox diaboh 


310 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


than the vox Dei—the voice of the devil than the 
voice of God. 

A rare example of such virtues, in these days 
especially, Samuel’s hands, I remark also, were as 
clear of bribes as of blood. The public good his 
only object, he neither aimed at political ascend- 
elicy nor pecuniary aggrandizement. Neither ani- 
mated with the love of power, nor, like Herod of 
worms, eaten up with the love of money, he made 
no use of the opportunities his office afforded to 
enrich himself ; and very probably retired from his 
post a poorer man than he entered on it. Though 
not culpable by indulging them like Eli, yet, like 
Eli and David, and other good men, unhappy in 
his sons, he had bitter cause to regret their bad 
behavior ; but had this to alleviate his sorrow, that 
he had set them no bad example. A practice too 
common then, and still, in eastern countries, and 
apt to be followed wherever men holding offices of 
trust are inadequately rewarded, Samuel’s sons, 
whom, in his old age, he had associated with him- 
self in the government of the country, resorted to 
dishonorable and dishonest means. They took 
bribes of suitors, and sold justice for money. But 
his own hands were clean. No stain tarnished the 
brightness of the old man’s name; nor, though 
feeling, no doubt, all the partialities of a father for 
his children, did he attempt to palliate their crimes, 
or screen them from public indignation. Walking 
in his integrity; fearing God, but no man’s face ; 
upright ; the soul of honor; his bosom glowing 
with the purest patriotism, how grand is his last 
appearance on the stage of public life !—grander 
far than all the pomp and lustre which, amid the 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 31T 


blaze of beauty, the blare of trumpets, and the roar 
of cannon, surrounds the coronation of a king. 
The sun never looked down on a more touching 
and impressive spectacle. With Saul, their anointed 
king, towering head and shoulders, in royal vest- 
ments, above the crowd of nobles, the tribes of 
Israel are met; and Samuel, bent with age and 
dismissed from office, is there to meet them. Con- 
scious of rectitude, nor fearing the face of any man, 
he comes to challenge them. They had rejected 
him ; he is there to ask them what grounds they 
had for doing so. Treated as one who had be- 
trayed his trust, he calls on them to allege it openly 
if they dare, and to prove it ifthey could. Long 
years of service, now forgotten, they had repaid 
with base ingratitude ; and he is here, old and gray- 
headed, to ask them what he had done to suffer 
such an ignominious fate. Not that he had clung 
to office ; or, mortified at the change, would retire 
into private life to pass the evening of his days in 
regrets at the loss of power and popularity—by no 
means. But he had his own character, and that of 
religion also, to vindicate ; and still aiming, even 
when he stood on his defence, at the public good, 
he had to teach his successor with what integrity 
to live and for what ends to rule. So coming to 
the front—to touch surely the hearts of many, as 
he stood with his hoary head and venerable form 
beneath the heavens of that God he had served so 
long and well, and face to face with a people whose 
ingratitude to him could not quench his love for 
them—he spoke out this lofty and noble appeal: 
“T am old and gray-headed, and I have walked 
before you from my childhood unto this day. Be- 


312 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


hold, here I am; witness against me before the 
Lord and before his anointed: Whose ox have I 
taken? or whose ass have I taken ? or whom have 
I defrauded ? whom have I oppressed ? or of whose 
hand have I received any bribe to blind my eyes 
therewith? and I will restore it you. The Lord 
is witness against you, and his anointed is witness 
this day that ye have not found aught in my hand !” 
And thus, with a dignity which nothing could sur- 
pass, he retired from public life amid, I trust, the 
tears and acclamations of the vast assembly—in 
point of lofty, unselfish, high-minded patriotism, 
the model of a ruler. 

Samuel was a pious, as well as patriotic, ruler. 

In wandering among the old houses of a pic- 
turesque and ancient capital one meets with curious 
vestiges of other days—ofa time when these abodes, 
now abandoned to squalor and poverty, were gay 
with fair ladies, and plumed nobles, and belted 
knights, all long forgotten and mouldered to dust. 
Amid the pensive thoughts which the contrast be- 
tween the present and the past, the scenes before 
our eyes and those which fancy calls up, suggests, 
it is a relief to find here and there something better 
than the vestiges of departed grandeur—evidences 
of piety clinging to these dingy tenements, like the 
wallflowers that impart beauty and fragrance to the 
stones of an old ruin. These are the inscriptions 
which our forefathers carved on the lintels of their 
doors, where, in Greek, or Latin, or English, in 
plain or old black letter, the passenger may still 
read, though defaced by the teeth of time, such 
texts as these—‘‘ Fear God and honor the king ;” 
“Except the Lord build the house, they labor in 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 313 


vain that build it ;’ ‘“‘The Lord is my Shepherd ; I 
shall not want ;” ‘‘ The Lord is my refuge and my 
fortress ; in Him will I trust.” Thereby, while we 
consecrate our churches, some in one, some in 
another, fashion—they seem to have consecrated 
their very houses to God: declaring to all men that 
their rule was to be his law, and their resolution 
that of his servant Joshua—‘‘ As for me and my 
house, we will serve the Lord.” Thus I interpret 
the handwriting on the wall, the voice of its stones. 
And similar are the voices of those old chapels 
which hold the dust of kings, and often form the 
most interesting parts of the ruined and roofless 
palaces where once they held their courts. It would. 
appear that in the rudest times of old an altar 
always rose near the throne ; and that an indispen- 
sable part of every palace, was the chapel, where he 
to whom others knelt, knelt to God; and learned 
to remember that there was One above him whose 
throne overshadowed his; at whose mercy-seat 
kings had to seek for mercy ; whose laws were to 
form the rule, and his glory the chief end of their 
government. It might be forgotten, nor may now 
once suggest itself to those who visit these scenes 
merely to gratify an antiquarian taste or an idle 
curiosity, but such customs had a pious origin ; and 
% might teach us to approach these silent ruins 
with reverential feet, to think that if the wood out 
of the timber, and the stone out of the wall, were 
to speak, it would be in the words of Scripture, 
The name of that place shall be, The Lord is there ! 

Simply the vicegerent of God, and no king, 
Samuel had no palace in Israel; the palace, if such 
it could be called, was the tabernacle, where God 


314 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


dwelt within the curtains of the holy place. No 
armed guards protected the person, nor gorgeous 
retinue attended the steps of Samuel. No pomp 
of royalty disturbed the simple manner of his life, 
or distinguished him from other men; yet there 
rose by his house in Ramah that which proclaimed 
to all the land the personal character of its ruler, 
and the principles on which he was to conduct his 
government. In away not to be mistaken, Samuel 
associated the throne with the altar ; earthly power 
with piety ; the good of the country with the glory 
of God. ‘He judged Israel,” it is said, ‘‘all the 
days of his life, and went from year to year in cir- 
cuit to Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh, and judged 
Israel in all these places; and his return was to 
Ramah, for there was his house, and there he judged 
Israel, and there,” it is added, “he duzlt an altar 
unto the Lord.” That altar had a voice no man 
could mistake. In a manner more expressive than 
proclamation made by the voice of royal heralds 
with painted tabards and sounding trumpets, it 
proclaimed to the tribes of Israel that piety was to 
be the character, and the will of God the rule, of 
his government. 

Happy the land which had its councils guided, 
and its borders defended, and even its battles won, 
by the prayers and piety of its ruler. Such a land 
was Israel in the days of Samuel. There was, in- 
deed, but one battle fought during the whole course 
of his government; and his prayers won it. The 
field was the same as that on the disastrous day 
when the ark of God was taken, and “ Ichabod, the 
glory is departed,” was written on the banners of 
Israel. The field was the same and the foe the 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 315 


same, but how different the issue! The story re- 
calls the day when, with Aaron supporting one arm 
and Hur the other, Moses sat on a hill apart, over- 
looking the combat ; and with his hands and prayers 
so turning, this or that way, the bloody tide of 
battle, that Amalek prevailed when these fell down, 
and Israel when they rose again to heaven. In 
terror of the Philistines, who had come up like a 
flood on their land, the people, trusting less to 
their own arms than to Samuel’s power with God, 
repaired to him, saying, “Cease not to cry unto the 
Lord our God for us.” Commonly, when danger 
overhangs a land, the ruler proclaims a fast, and 
calls on his people for their prayers ; but here— 
rare occurrence, and remarkable testimony to 
Samuel’s piety—the people implore their ruler’s 
prayers. Happy the land where religion has its 
choicest abode in the palace, saying, “ This is my 
rest; here will I dwell!” Happy the land where 
the hands that wield the sceptre have power with 
God ; and its inhabitants believe that with their 
ruler on his knees they shall have Heaven on their 
side. 

So it fell out with Israel in the days of Samuel. 
On the eve of battle, “‘ he took,” we are told, “a 
sucking lamb, and offered it for a burnt offering 
wholly unto the Lord, and cried unto the Lord for 
Israel, and the Lord heard him.” The moment 
was that of the Philistines drawing near to battle ; 
and the result was this, that they found Samuel on 
his knees more formidable than a bannered host. 
He prays; and suddenly his voice is drowned in 
the roar of elements. God himself descends into 
the fight ; and the tribes that had come up to battle 


316 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


—to slay and be slain—hai nothing to do but 
slay ; to hang on the broken ranks of their enemies 
—pursue and kill them. ‘‘The Lord thundered 
with a great thunder on the Philistines, and dis- 
comfited them,” says the inspired historian ; “and 
they were smitten before Israel.” Such good, 
though bloody, work did prayers and piety achieve 
that day ; and for long ages afterwards, in the very 
field that was once the scene of a disastrous defeat, 
a great gray stone stood up, a monument of a 
divine deliverance, and of a victory won by the 
prayers of him who raised it there—calling the 
name of it Ebenezer, saying, ‘‘ Hitherto hath the 
Lord helped us !” 

Unlike those days the hues of whose bright and 
gorgeous dawn are succeeded by a gloomy change, 
-—clouds that, gathering like foes around him, close 
in upon the sun, and spread, and thicken, and 
burst out at length into lashing rain and roaring 
tempest, making the day, down to its close, belie 
all the promises of the morning,—the close, and 
indeed the whole course of Samuel’s public life, 
were in beautiful harmony with its commencement. 
He fulfilled all a fond and pious mother’s hopes. 
He disappointed none. God was the centre around 
which he, as well as heaven, turned. In all his 
difficulties he repaired to God for counsel. The 
laws which governed his acts as a statesman and 
his decisions as a judge were those of God’s Word ; 
and, unlike this world’s statesmen, never turned 
aside by considerations of expediency, of this or 
that present advantage, he steered his course by 
those principles of eternal truth-and justice which 
give consistency to conduct ; because fixed as the 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 317 


pole star that, changing neither with seasons nor 
circumstances, abides immovable in the sky—sure 
guide of the mariner, both in calm and tempest, 
along the rocky shore and out on the open sea. 
Some men die better than they live. England’s 
great dramatist says of one who made a good end, 
that ‘‘nothing in life became him so much as the 
leaving it.” But more may be said of Samuel’s 
career—its close was not better, but in perfect har- 
mony with its whole course. How inspired, with 
the loftiest piety and the purest patriotism, is the 
farewell oration he addressed to Saul and the as- 
sembled tribes ere the curtain fell, and he bade a 
last adieu to office and earthly power: ‘‘ Turn not 
aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord 
with all your heart. For the Lord will not forsake 
his people for his great name’s sake: because it 
hath pleased the Lord to make you his people. 
Moreover, as for me, God forbid that I should sin 
against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you; but I 
will teach you the good and the right way; only 
fear the Lord, and serve Him in truth with all your 
heart ; for consider how great things He hath done 
for you. But if ye shall still do wickedly, ye shall 
be consumed, both you and your king.” 

What an example Samuel presents to our magis- 
trates, our judges, our members of parliament—to 
all entrusted with authority, from the Queen to the 
humblest parent whose kingdom is the narrow walls 
of a household : and how should all who love their 
God and country pray that every post of honor 
and of public trust may be filled with a man of the 
typeofSamuel! The fear of man bringeth a snare ; 
but who, like Samuel, has the fear of God is raised 


318 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


above it. The favor of God is life ; and who, like 
Samuel, seeks it will not be drawn aside by that of 
man. God is the judge of all, both of the quick 
and of the dead ; and who, like Samuel, carries a 
sense of that to the bench of justice will keep the 
ermine of his robes unstained, and give righteous 
judgment ; who, like Samuel, takes the word of 
God for his rule, and looks to the recompense of 
reward, may meet with the ingratitude, but will 
never betray the interests of the crown or of his 
country. I put unlimited confidence, indeed, in 
ho man—‘ Haw have the mighty fallen; and 
the weapons of war, how have they perished !” 
But I put little confidence of any kind in that man, 
whatever his office be, who has not the fear of God 
before his eyes, and higher motives of action than 
belong to earth and end with time. Religion is 
the root of honor ; piety the only true foundation 
of patriotism ; and the best defence of a country, 
a people nursed up in godliness—of such virtue, 
energy, and high morale, that, animated with a 
courage which raises them above the fear of death, 
they may be exterminated, but cannot be subdued. 
It is not, as some allege, our blood, with its happy 
mixture of Celtic, Saxon, and Scandinavian 
elements, but the religion of our island—our Bibles, 
our schools, our Sabbaths, our churches, and our 
Christian homes—which, more than any and than 
all things else, has formed the character of its in- 
habitants ; and to that more than to the genius of 
its statesmen, or toits fleets and armies, Britain owes 
her unexampled prosperity, and the peace that has 
brooded for a hundred years unbroken on her sea- 
girt shores. Let us be grateful for this ; and resolved 


SAMUEL THE RULER. 319 


to regard the ark of God—our religion—as the palla- 
dium of our country ; let us devoutly recognize in its 
happy fortunes the same providence as marked, and 
rewarded, the pious rule of Samuel ; of which this 
notable circumstance is recorded, ‘‘ SO THE PHILIS- 
TINES WERE SUBDUED, AND THEY CAME NO 
MORE INTO THE COAST OF ISRAEL ; AND THE 
HAND OF THE LORD WAS AGAINST THE PHILIS- 
TINES ALL THE DAYS OF SAMUEL.” 


32C STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Gonathan the friend. 


THERE is a bay that, throwing out to sea two 
bold headlands, sweeps with deep and grace- 
ful curve into the land. It is girdled by lofty 
walls of wave-washed and weather-beaten rock, 
which exclude any view of the fields and farms 
that lie beyond. No situation more lonely! Yet 
on its long reach of yellow sands, with no com- 
panion nor sound but the measured dash of billows, 
nor sign of life but the white wing of a sea-gull, or 
alone ship sailing on the distant rim of ocean, I 
have not felt any sense of solitude there ; or, if felt, 
it was pleasing rather than painful. And so has it 
been in other equally lonely circumstances. Once 
when, belated in a Highland glen, I stood alone 
under frowning crags and dark mountains on the 
silent margin of its mdssy loch, with thick gloom 
all around, save where the last lights of day, touch- 
ing the upper end of the waters, turned them into a 
sheet of silver ; and once also when from the cairn 
of a Scottish alp, I looked around on a tumbling 
sea of hills, nor, save a blue thread of smoke that 
curled up from the far verge of the forest, saw a 
sign of human life, or indeed any living object but 
an eagle, which, pausing on its flight in these realms 
of air, hovered for a little overhead, sweeping round 
and round to examine with keen and curious glance 





JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 321 


him that had intruded on her lone domains. Camp- 
bell, the poet, has painted in vivid colors the 
loneliness, the solemn solitude, of the last living 
man: 
‘I saw @ visionin my sleep, 
That gave my spirit strength to sweep 
Adown the gulf of Time ! 
I saw the last of human mould 
That shall Creation’s death behold, 
As Adam in her prime! 
The sun’s eye had a sickly glare, 
The earth with age was wan, 
Theo skeletons of nations were 
Around that lonely man |! 


Some had expired in fight—the brands 
Still rusted in their bony hands ; 

In plague and famine some. 
Earth’s cities had no sound nor tread 3; 
And ships were drifting with the dead 

To shores where all was dumb.” 


Yet it were not there, nor is it anywhere so much 
as among his fellows, and in crowds especially, man 
would feel most lonely. It has been truly and 
beautifully said of a devout man in a desert, on a 
lone moor, or in a death-desolated house, with no 
other company but God, that when most alone he 
is least alone; but it may be as true of a man 
surrounded by a mighty crowd and jostled on the 
busy streets, with friends and lovers far away, that 
when least alone he is most alone. Hence the force 
of the old Latin saying, Magna civitas, magna 
solitudo— A great city, a great solitude.” That is 
true ; very true. For, to speak from personal ex- 
perience—and thousands have felt the same—I 
never felt so lonely as long years ago, when, taking 

21 


322 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


days and nights to make the journey between 
Edinburgh and London, I was set down on a 
winter evening amid the glare and bustle and roar 
of the metropolis, among crowds which neither 
caring whether I lived or died, hardly left room 
to walk, and in a city among whose thronging 
millions I had but two acquaintances, and no 
friend. 

In such a situation the presence of a crowd gives 
no feeling of companionship ; and with no expres- 
sion of recognition or interest in us on any face we 
meet, to walk the streets is in some respects like 
walking alone ina gallery of portraits. The absence 
of friends makes the busiest place a solitude ; nor is 
there any vacuum Nature abhors more than that. 
She teaches us to seek a heart that beats in unison 
with our own; looks of sympathy and kindness ; a 
bosom into which we can pour the secrets of our 
souls ; when burdens press heavy, an arm to lean 
on; when our back is at the wall, an ally to stand 
fighting by our side ; in our difficulties a counsellor 
to advise with ; in our sorrows one to divide, and in 
our joys one to double them. This is so natural, 
and to possess such a friend is both so delightful 
and profitable, that, whether his home be a castle 
or a cabin, and he himself a king or a beggar, even 
though he was rich with the wealth of banks, and 
filled the earth with his fame, for a man to want 
friends, true friends, according to Lord Bacon, is to 
find this world a wilderness. 

The value which all ages and countries have set 
on friendship may be estimated by the honors they 
have paid to it, and the care they have taken te 
embalm the memory of those whose lives have 


JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 323 


afforded remarkable illustrations of what friendship 
could dare, and bear,anddo. We have an example 
of this in the beautiful story of Damon and Pythias, 
where we see how it has filled the worst of men 
with admiration, disarming the hand and quenching 
the rage oftyrants. The first,a Pythagorean philo- 
sopher, was condemned to death by Dionysius ; 
the execution of the sentence, however, being sus- 
pended in consequence of his obtaining leave to go 
home to settle his domestic affairs—a favor which 
the tyrant granted on condition of his returning by 
a stated day to suffer the penalty of death. The 
promise was given, but not reckoned sufficient. He 
dies on the spot, unless he finds a hostage—a friend 
who will pledge himself to diein his room. At this 
juncture Pythias steps forward; and delivering 
himself up to the hands of the tyrant, becomes 
Damon’s surety—to wait his friend’s return, or 
suffer in his stead. At length the day arrives and 
the hour; but no Damon. Pythias must be his 
substitute ; and he is ready. Thanking the gods 
for the adverse winds that retarded the ship in 
which Damon sailed, he prepares to die, a sacrifice 
on the altar of friendship. And had fallen, but that 
before the blow descends, Damon rushes panting on 
the scene. Now the strange and friendly strife 
begins. Each is eager to die for the other; and 
each, appealing to Dionysius, claims the bloody 
sword as his right and privilege. Though inured 
to scenes of cruelty, the tyrant cannot look unmoved 
on such a scene as this. Touched by this rare 
exhibition of affection, he is melted: nor only 
remits the punishment, but entreats them to permit 
him hereafter to share their friendship and enjoy 


324 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


their confidence. What an honor it were to the 
Gospel were there many instances of such friend- 
ship among its professors! Why should there not ? 
Has not Jesus laid this injunction on us all, ‘‘ Love 
one another, even as I have loved you ?” 

There is another, and almost equally remarkable, 
example of friendship told of such as never heard of 
Him who is the friend of sinners. It is so remark- 
able indeed that it procured divine honors to 
Orestes and Pylades from the Scythians—a race so 
bloody, rude, and savage, that they are said to have 
fed on human flesh, and made drinking-cups of their 
enemies’ skulls. Engaged in an arduous enterprise, 
Orestes and Pylades, two sworn friends, landed on 
the shores of the Chersonesus to find themselves in 
the dominions and power of a king whose practice 
was to seize on all strangers, and sacrifice them at 
the shrine of Diana. The travellers were arrested. 
They were carried before the tyrant ; and, doomed 
to death, were delivered over to Iphigenia, who, as 
priestess of Diana’s temple, had to immolate the 
victims. Her knife is buried in their bosoms, but 
that she learns before the blow is struck that they 
are Greeks—natives of her own native country. 
Anxious to open up a communication with the land 
of her birth, she offers to spare one of the two, on 
condition that the survivor will become her messen- 
ger, and carry a letter to her friends in Greece. But 
which shall live, and which shall die? That is the 
question. The friendship which had endured for 
years, in travels, and courts, and battle-fields is now 
put to a strain it never bore before. And nobly it 
bearsit. Neither willaccept the office of messenger, 
leaving his fellow to the stroke of death. Each 


JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 325 


implores the priestess to select him for the sacri‘ce ; 
and let the other go. While they contend for the 
pleasure and honor of dying, Iphigenia discovers 
in one of them her own brother. She embraces 
him ; and sparing both, flees with them from that 
cruel shore. Both are saved ; and the story, borne 
on the wings of fame, flies abroad, fills the world 
with wonder, and, carried to distant regions, excited 
such admiration among the barbarous Scythians, 
that they paid divine honors to Orestes and Py- 
lades, and deifying these heroes, erected temples to 
their worship. 

How far these old-world tales are true, and how 
far they may have been exaggerated by tradition, 
and received, like a wall which is covered and tinted 
with golden lichens, their glowing colors from the 
hands of time, it would be idle to inquire. But the 
legends must have had some foundation in truth— 
some gallant deed had been done to form the 
nucleus of such remarkable traditions. We should 
not like, at any rate, to part with that belief—such 
cases throwing a glory over our fallen humanity 
that we delight to linger on, as on those traces of 
beauty that survive the stroke of death; as on the 
flowers that, rooted in its refts and fed by dews and 
sunbeams, adorn the walls of some noble ruin. But 
to illustrate what a friend has been, and friends 
should be, we have a yet brighter example and more 
certainly truthful story in that of Jonathan—at once 
so touchinSandeso*tragic. 

Many friendships—traceable to near neighbor- 
hood, a common playground, the same form at 
school, some accidental meeting on a road or ina 
room—spring from trivial circumstances. Growing 


326 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


strong only with the progress of years, they resemble 
our streams which, though at length swelling into 
rivers, are at first but tiny rills; feeble in ‘their 
beginning, and springing from mossy wells, of 
obscure and humble birth. It was not so with 
Jonathan’s friendship. It finds its type in those 
rivers, the Rhine and Rhone for instance, which, fed 
by exhaustless snows, and springing into light in 
lofty regions, high above the sea to whose distant 
shores their waters wend, are rivers at their birth ; 
bursting from the icy caverns of Alpine glaciers in 
full, impetuous flood. It had its origin in a very 
memorable event, and on one of the most notable 
days in the whole history of Israel. 

The peasant had left his plough in the furrow, 
the fisherman his boat on the lake, the shepherd 
his flock to the care of boys and women; and 
gathering from the hills of Bethlehem, and the 
shores of Galilee, and the remotest ends of the 
country, its best and bravest sons had mustered to 
its defence. With Saul at their head and their 
fathers’ swords in their hands, they have set the 
battle in array against the Philistines in the valley 
of Elam—yet shrink from it. They are appalled. 
A giant who stalks forth day after day into the 
valley that divides the opposing hosts, and chal- 
lenges Israel, and blasphemes Israel’s God, has 
struck the boldest with terror. Ge lingerer at 
home in such a crisis, no coward, but distinguished 
as much for his bravery as for his rank, Jonathan 
was there ; and I can fancy how his heart was ready 
to burst with vexation, how he chafed and fretted, 
as, slowly retreating before the steps of this terrible 
antagonist, he obeyed his father’s orders, and yield- 


JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 327 


ing to the dictates of prudence, declined Goliah’s 
challenge—refysing to fling away his life in such an 
unequal contest? Grieved at the insults cast on the 
arms of Israel; trembling with anxiety for his 
father’s life and crown; wounded to the heart by 
the blasphemies of the uncircumcised Philistine ; 
often withdrawing from the bustle and distractions 
of the camp to seek on his knees light and help 
from God, and cry to Him, in his despair of any help 
from man, “‘ How long, O Lord, how long! Why 
do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain 
thing? Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: 
as smoke is driven away, so drive thou them away; 
as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked 
perish in the presence of God ;” with such feelings 
I can fancy that of all the eyes that day turned on 
David, Jonathan’s watched him with the greatest 
agitation. What astonishment and admiration he 
felt for the gallant stripling ! what anxious prayers 
he put up on his behalf, as he saw him, clad in a 
shepherd’s garb, his heart armed with faith, but his 
hand only with a sling, step out boldly from the 
lines to accept the challenge—to bring away the 
giant’s head, or leave his own to feed the fowls of 
heaven! The stone sped on its fatal errand. Go- 
liah falls; and with a shout that rends the air, 
Israel hails the conqueror. And when the strip- 
ling, so young and yet so brave, crowned with such 
honor and yet so modest, so full of love to his 
country and piety to his God, advances to lay his 
bloody trophy at the feet of Saul, Jonathan’s whoie 
heart flows out to him; he becomes at once the 
object of a deep and deathless love. It came to 
pass, to use the beautiful language of Scripture, 


328 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


that, when David modestly replying to Saul’s ques- 
tion, “‘ Whose son art thou?” ‘I am the son of thy 
servant Jesse the Bethlehemite,” had made an end 
of speaking, the soul of Jonathan was knit with 


the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as - 


his own soul So their friendship began; and 
its continuance, under the most adverse circum- 
stances, was even more remarkable than its com- 
mencement. 
The friendships are few that survive years of 
p sea ; the shock of conflicting interests; the 
rain made on our old affections by new claims; the 
ials they are put to by infirmities of temper, by 
in dealing with faults, by a manly independence, 
y requests refused, by favors unrequited, by the 
ivalries of business, by the partisanship that 
springs from creeds or politics, and by a thousand 
other nameless circumstances. Fragile as the 
flowers the winter frost traces on our windows, 
there are friendships that a breath will melt away. 
It may be very wrong and very pitiful, but, as the 
wise man says, ‘‘a whisperer separateth chief 
friends ;” and who lives long lives to see so many, 
like leaves the frost has nipped, fall off, and the 
ties which friendships had formed, so often and 
sometimes so easily dissolved, that he comes to 
rea | with little astonishment, and no great sense of 
exaggeration, the words of one who, describing his 
relationships, said, ‘‘ Though the church would not 
hold my acquaintances, the pulpit is large enough 
to hold all my friends.” 
Happily, there are friendships that stand the 
test of time and the everest strain; but among 
these, what poet or panegyrist has recorded with 





JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 329 


glowing pen one to be compared with Jonathan’s ? 
It is quite unique; remarkable as his father’s sta- 
ture when Saul, shrinking, as great men have done, 
from an office of great responsibility, hid himself 
among the stuff, and, directed by God where to 
find him, the people ‘fran and fetched him thence: 
and when he stood among the people, he was 
higher than any of the people from his shoulders 
and upward; and Samuel said, See ye him whom 
the Lord hath chosen, that there is none like him 
among all the people!” The words of the poet 
may be justly applied to Jonathan,— 
*¢ None but himself could be his parallel.” 

For example, men will praise their friends, but 
how few are generous enough without jealousy to 
hear others praise them, at their expense, in eulo- 
giums they feel to be disparaging to themselves. 
There is no passion more natural to us, man or 
child, than jealousy. See how it broke out against 
David from the lips of his own brother! indignant 
at the stripling for talking as if he would meet 
the giant, and carry off the palm from his brethren 
and all the host of Israel, Eliab sharply rebuked 
him, asking, ‘‘ Why camest thou down thither? and 
with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the 
wilderness? I know thy pride, and the naughti- 
ness of thine heart.” And who that knows his own 
heart will refuse some sympathy to Saul for taking 
offence—however unjustifiable his way of express- 
ing it—at the disparaging comparison in the song 
of the maidens when dancing before David, they 
sung, ‘Saul has slain his thousands, but David his 
tens of thousands.” We wonder not at Saul’s 


offence, but at se coe. The song 


330 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


that grated so harshly on his father’s ear, stirred 
up nor envy, nor jealousy, in him. Rejoicing in an- 
ther’s honor, he hailed the rise of a sun that 
paled his own star; and though, as Saul’s eldest 
on, standing next the throne, Jonathan was con- 
ent to be second to the good, brave, gallant shep- 
herd, who had gone forth in the name and strength 
of the Lord to shut the mouth of the blasphemer, 
nd peril his life for the safety of his country and 
the honor of his God. 

Then see what severe trials this friendship en- 
dured; and enduring, triumphed over. Saul’s 
gloomy eye fixed on David, the javelin he hurled 
to pin him to the wall, the cries of his soldiers 
echoing from the rocks as they hunted the fugitive 
from cave to cave, and hill to hill, not more illus- 
trating the words, “ Jealousy is cruel as the grave ; 
the coals thereof are coals of fire,” than the friend- 
ship of Jonathan did those which follow, “ Many 
waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods 
drown it.” 

Happier in his eldest son than David in Absa- 
lom, than many fathers, and most kings, in theirs, 
Saul had a pious, most noble, brave, and dutiful 
son in Jonathan. What piety, for example, in the 
words he addresses to his armor-bearer, when, 
pointing across the gorge to a garrison of the 
Philistines, he proposed, single-handed, to attack it, 
saying, ‘Come and let us go over; it may be that 
the Lord will work for us: for there is no restraint 
to the Lord, to save by many or by few!” What 
exploit in the annals of war braver, or so brave, as 
that which followed—when, scaling their rocky 
fastness on his hands and knees, he leaped head- 


‘ 





JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 331 


long among a swarm of Philistines, and, receiving 
the battle on his single shield, mowed them down 
like grass before the scythe? Thus gloriously 
broke the day on Israel—filling the hearts of her 
warriors with courage for the coming battle; but, 
like many that rise with dawn of brightest promise, 
it had nearly set in the deepest gloom. The vic- 
tory is won; but at what a price? His father has 
made a rash vow; and he now requires that Jona- 
than shall die. It was hard to part with wife and 
children, hard to leave the world in the flush of life 
and the very hour of victory, yet he submits him- 
self to his father’s will. Baring a bosom seamed 
and scarred with wounds suffered in that father’s 
cause, he stands ready to receive the stroke—a 
sacrifice to filial piety ; and had fallen, but that the 
people, brandishing swords red with the blood of 
the Philistines, broke out into open revolt, and 
throwing themselves before Saul, said, ‘Shall 
Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salva- 
tion for Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth, 
there shall not one hair of his head fall to the 
ground. So the people rescued Jonathan, that he 
died not.” 

The reed that bends its head to a breath of 
wind, and the old gray rock which withstands the 
hurricane that strews the plain with trees and the 
foaming shore with wrecks, are not more unlike 
than Jonathan where his own interests, and the 
same Jonathan where David’s interests were con- 
cerned. Such was the depth and power of his 
affection for his friend. Here neither Saul’s en- 
treaties, nor anger, nor violence, could move him. 
He would part with life to please his father, but 


J 


332 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


not with his love for David. When Saul, to the 
stonishment of the host, proposed to sacrifice his 
on to a rash and wicked vow, Jonathan neither 
ade resistance nor remonstrance—like Him whose 
divine friendship his recalls, he “‘ was dumb, open- 
ing not his mouth.” But when Saul threatens 
David's life, he refuses obedience, and becomes the 
advocate of his friend ; in words replete with affec- 
tion, a pious spirit, and unanswerable arguments, 
he pleads with his father; he remonstrates with 
him, saying, ‘‘ Let not the king sin against his ser- 
vant, against David ; because he hath not sinned 
against thee, and his works to theeward have been 
very good: for he did put his life in his hand, and 
slew the Philistine, and the Lord wrought a great 
salvation for all Israel: thou sawest it, and didst 
rejoice : wherefore then wilt thou sin against inno- 
cent blood, to slay David without a cause ?” 

Saul makes many attempts to awaken Jonathan’s 
jealousy, and kindle in his son’s bosom the hatred 
that burned and raged in his own. But they are 
vain. Nor does he succeed any better when all 
his pent-up passions burst forth in volcanic fury on 
discovering that David, the object of his hatred, is 
to be the successor to his throne. In that disco- 
very he flatters himself he holds a spell of power 
to turn Jonathan’s love into the bitterest hatred, 
and raise all the devil in hisson. There was no 
devil to raise. The dreadful secret is revealed ; 
but whatever pain is inflicted, whatever struggle it 
cost, whatever tears it wrung from Jonathan’s eyes, 
it kindles no bad passions in that pious, generous, 
and loving heart. 

If piety is shown by a regard to God and a child- 











JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 333 


like submission to his sovereign will, by taking up 
our cross and denying ourselves daily that we may 
follow Christ, by saying, like Jesus himself, as he 


- took the bitter cup of our sorrows from his Father’s 


hand, “Father, not my will, but thine be done,” 
what finer example of this grace than Jonathan ? 
David is to supplant him ; David is to enter on the 
honors and fortune he expected to enjoy; and 
out of the ruins of Saul’s house, David is to build 

is own; yet Jonathan ceases not to regard him 
bit unabated and the tenderest affection. For 

his his father loads him with cruel reproaches ; 
4nd, borne away on the foaming torrent of his pas- 
sions, insults the very name and memory of his 
mother ; calling him “the son of a rebellious and 
perverse woman.” But these reproaches—like 
the javelin his mad hand hurled at his son—are all 
in vain. Jonathan leaves the presence of his father 
to seek David, and warn him of what was no longer 
doubtful, hisimminent danger. With what affection 
they meet ; with what bitter sorrow and loving 
vows they part ; tender as brave, ‘“‘ they kissed one 
another, and wept one with another, until David 


peace, forasmuch as we have sworn both of us in 


| pes and Jonathan said to David, Go in 


| 


/ 


the name of the Lord, saying, The Lord be be- 
tween me and thee, and between my seed and thy 
seed forever.” Once again they met. It was in 
the wood of Ziph, and probably under the cloud of 
night. There, strong in faith and clinging to the 
hope of better days, Jonathan sets himself to com- 
fort the friend of his bosom. “Fear not,” he says 
to David, “for the hand of Saul my father shall 
not find thee ; and thou shalt be king over Israel, 


334 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


and I shall be next unto thee ;” and so, neither of 

them anticipating that this was to be their last 

meeting on earth, they parted—never to meet 
more; Jonathan to leave behind him a name 
sacred to friendship, and enter, ere long, through 

a bloody passage into welcome rest; David to 

mourn his loss, and cherish Jonathan’s sweet me- 

mory, and lay on his grave the finest wreath ever 
bedewed with tears and woven in honor of the 
ead. 
Tender as a woman, and yet true as steel, over- 
owing with generous kindness, utterly devoid of 
elfishness, trusting as much as he was trusted, 
ith a heart that reflected David’s as face an- 
wereth to face in water, Jonathan was the paragon 
nd perfect pattern of a friend. Many a fond lie 
as been written on tombstones ; and with all their 
good qualities magnified by the tears through 
which we gaze on them, the dead appear fairer, 
dearer, and better than they ever seemed in life ; 
but Jonathan was altogether worthy of this grand 
eulogium : 

‘‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places : how are 
the mighty fallen ! 

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon ; 
lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters 
of the uncircumcised triumph. 

Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be 
Tain upon you, nor fields of offerings : for there the shiald of the 
mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he 
had not been anointed with oil. 

From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow 
of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not 
empty. 

Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in 
their death they were not divided : they were swifter than eagles, 
they were stronger than lions. 


JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 335 


Ye daughiers of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, 
with other delights ; who put on ornaments of gold upon your 
apparel. 

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the baitle! O Jona- 
than, thou wast slain in thine high places. 

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan : very pleasant hast 
thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the 
love of women. 

How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished !” 


To make some practical use of this matter, I 
remark,— 

1. Every one should seek and cultivate friend- 
ships. Man has no room in his heart to accom- 
modate many friends; but, as God said in Eden, 
it is not good that man should be alone. Isolation 
breeds selfishness, moroseness ; and these are apt 
to run into misanthropy. Those friendships which 
are essential to the happiness as well as the com- 
plete development of our nature, form, indeed, one 
of the most marked distinctions between us and 
those animals that resemble us in their social 
habits—the rooks, for instance, which crowd the 
same tree with their nests, and, rising by thousands 
into the air, fill it with their cries and darken it 
with their sable wings; the cattle that roam pas- 
tures and prairie in countless herds ; those fishes 
that, moving in vast shoals, make the green sea 
glitter with their silver scales. These all seek 
companionship. God has endowed them with that 
instinct. Yet in their normal condition, and unless 
where their nature is modified by domestication, 
they show no sign, nor even seem to be capable, of 
friendship. So necessary, however, is it for the 
happiness of man and the complete development 
of his nature, that kings, who are often required by 


336 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


policy to stand aloof on their cold, unenviable ele- 
vation from their highest nobles, have raised ser- 
vants into favorites, and sought the pleasures of 
friendship in the confidence and company of 
menials. Soured, blighted, disappointed with the 
world, some make friends of domestic animals, and 
give to birds and dogs and cats the affections which 
belong to man ; and there is a touching story of a 
captive, cut off from human society and long im- 
mured in a lonely dungeon of the Bastille, whose 
heart, craving some object of friendship, found it 
in a spider he had tamed, and which his brutal 
jailer cruelly destroyed. 

Besides gratifying one of the strongest instincts 
of humanity, friendship is recommended by its 
many advantages. These are equal to its plea- 
sures. A friend, for example, can ask for us what 
modesty may hinder us from asking for ourselves. 
A friend can do justice to our merits, urge our 
claims, defend our character, and do a hundred 
things else for us it would not seem proper that we 
should do for ourselves. But perhaps one of the 
greatest advantages he enjoys who possesses a 
kind, honest, wise, discreet, faithful friend, lies in 
this, that amid difficulties he has a counsellor to 
advise, and against dangers a monitor to warn 
him. Happy those especially who have friends 
that will not see sin in them ; and, without being 
censorious, will tell them to their face what others 
say behind their back—point out their faults and 
failings, giving them occasion to say, ‘‘Let the 
righteous smite me, it shall be a kindness ; and let 
him reprove me, it shall be an excellent oil which 
shall not break my head.” It is here, indeed, that 





JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 337 


friendship is most commonly at fault. ‘‘ Meddle 
not,” says the wise man, ‘‘ with him that flattereth ;” 
but—and this brings out the value of a faithful 
friend—there is not in smooth and oily tongue any 
such flatterer as a man’s own self. The difference, 
it has been well said, between the counsel a friend 
giveth and a man giveth himself being as great as 
between the counsel of a friend and the counsel of 
a flatterer. Hence the value of those who will 
give us good advice at the risk of giving us offence ; 
and will rather forfeit our friendship than not 
attempt to save our interests and especially our 
souls. The warnings and counsels of such friends 
may wound our feelings ; but so does the surgeon 
who inflicts pain to preserve life, and cuts that 
he may cure—‘‘ Faithful are the wounds of a 
friend.” 

2. In choosing friends, we should select such as 
promise, by the tone of their conversation, and by 
their moral and religious character, to prove friends 
indeed—such as we can trust in the hour of adver- 
sity, and would like to see by our dying-bed. 
Acquaintances are one thing, but friends another. 
Whoever, therefore, our acquaintances may be, we 
should, in the choice of friends, be guided by 
what determined David in the selection as well of 
his servants as of his associates—‘‘I am a com- 
panion of all them that fear Thee, and of them 
that keep Thy precepts. Mine eyes shall be upon 
the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with 
me; he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall 
serve me.” The friendship of the world, as the 
Bible says, is enmity with God; and to its in- 
fluence, to bad and dangerous associates, how many 

22 


338 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


promising youths, especially, owe their ruin—-theis 
chosen friends proving to be their worst foes! 
Better they took a serpent to their bosom than 
made a friend of the Sabbath-breaker, of the im- 
pure, of the scoffer, of the ungodly! Such com- 
panionship is more to be dreaded than the clutches 
of a drowning man. Choosing for his friends the 
friends of Jesus, “he that walketh with wise men 
shall be wise ;” but not less true, and illustrated by 
the fate of thousands, who are drawn at first into 
sin and at last into perdition, the words that 
follow, “The companion of fools shall be de- 
stroyed.” 

3. We should seek a friend in Jesus Christ—the 
best, truest, kindest, surest friend man ever had. 
Everliving, everloving, and everlasting, there is no 
father like our Father who is in heaven; and as 
there is no fatherhood like God’s, there is no 
friendship like Christ’s—to be once named with 
His who, dying for us, the just for the unjust, laid 
down His life, not for friends, but enemies. Other 
friends change: not He. Of them we may, and 
often do, expect too much; nor will friendship be 
Jong maintained between us unless we lay our 
account with sooner or later discovering, and bear- 
ing with, their faults. But Jesus is faultless ; alto- 
gether lovely—a friend on whose favor we cannot 
reckon, and from whose kindness we cannot ex- 
pect, too much. With a wider and far deeper 
meaning than the world attaches to the expression, 
in Him we have “a friend at court ;” whose inter- 
cessions for us, in contrast with those of Jonathan 
for David, are addressed to a gracious ear and a 
loving heart- In the presence of his Father and 





JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 339 


mid the glories of the upper sanctuary, at the 
“ternal source of all love and blessing and power, 
where pardons are granted to save, and grace is 
bestowed to sanctify, and angels wait to welcome, 
and mansions stand ready to receive us, He pleads 
our cause at God’s right hand, omnipotent to save. 

Like summer birds which come and go with the 
sun, like our shadow which deserts us when his 
face is clouded, like fair flowers that close their 
leaves as soon as rain begins to fall or cold winds 
to blow, earthly friends may desert us when we 
most need their sympathy and support —at the 
time, and in the circumstances, expressed in the 
well-known adage, ‘‘ A friend in need ts a friend 
indeed.” But such a friend is Jesus Christ. 
Sweetest when trials are bitterest, kindest when 
others are cruellest, nearest when danger is greatest, 
his character is delineated in the words, ‘‘ A friend 
loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adver- 
sity ;” and his image, though faintly, is beautifully 
shadowed forth in the mother who presses the 
tender infant closest to her bosom when storms 
beat and winds blow the coldest. In view of that 
dread hour when father, mother, husband, wife, 
children, acquaintances, wealth, and life itself, shall 
leave us, He says, “I will never leave you, nor for- 
sake you: when thou passest through the waters, 
I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they 
shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through 
the fire, thou shalt not be burned : neither shall the 
flame kindle upon thee.” Nor shall they—his pre- 
sence with us there working a greater wonder than 
on the day Israel passed dryshod through the sea, 
er the three Hebrew children breathed in a burn- 


340 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


ing furnace, and walked unharmed on coals of 
fire. 

One of the old Fathers tells a parable, which, 
with a slight alteration, illustrates this subject ; 
and, in view of an hour of death, and a day of judg- 
ment, may well recommend to our acceptance and 
confidence and peace and joy the friendship of the 
Friend of sinnérs. A man summoned to answer 
for his crimes, and called in question for his life, 
sought help of three friends he had. The first 
agreed to bear him company for a part of the way; 
the second would lend him some money for his 
journey ; while the third undertook to go all the 
way with him, to appear in court, and plead his 
cause. Soruns the story. In this man, the repre- 
sentative of a lost and guilty race, we see ourselves: 
and in the three friends whose help he sought, we 
see the flesh, or our fellow-creatures, the world with 
its wealth, and Christ, the sinner’s Friend. And 
what can earthly friends, our dearest, do when 
death summons us to judgment, beyond accom- 
panying us some way tothe grave? We part onits 
gloomy threshold; further they cannot go. Nor 
can wealth and worldly goods help us to more than 
a winding sheet—the coffin that receives, and the 
tomb that closes on, our cold remains. But Jesus 
—the friend that sticketh closer than a brother— 
when heart and flesh faint and fail, shall be the 
strength of our heart, and our portion for evermore. 
He will never leave us. And when the gates of 
heaven have opened to receive us, and we have 
heard Him advocate our cause, and receive amid 
the loud plaudits of saints and angels, a verdict of 
acquittal, and in a blood-bought crown the reward 


JONATHAN THE FRIEND. 341 


of faith, then shall we fully know that there is no 
friend like Him whom his enemies reproached, but 
his people love to think of, as the Friend of sinners. 
Happy for us if the coldness and alienation of old 
friends, whose countenance has changed, and by 
whose once oft-frequented doors we pass to sigh 
over the falsehood or frailty of earthly friendships, 
make us cling the closer to Jesus, the same yester- 
day, to-day, and to-morrow— 


‘¢ Nor death nor life, nor earth nor hell, 
Nor time’s destroying sway, 
Can e’er efface us from his heart, 
Or make his love decay. 


Each future period that will bless, 
As it has bless’d the past ; 

He loved us from the first of time, 
He loves us to the last.” 


342 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 





Habid the Aillicted Ban. 


IT is not uncommon to read in the preface ta 
works which good men have left as legacies to 
the church, that their lives, passed amid quiet 
scenes and in the routine of useful but common 
duties, furnish few materials for biography. Their 
course in life less resembles a river that often swells 
into floods,—here leaps the foaming cataract, there 
thunders among the rocks through which it has cut 
itself a path, and only rests in great deep pools, to 
gather strength, as it were, for another rush,—than 
one which, while adorning the landscape and im- 
parting verdure to the fields it flows through, steals 
along in silence to the sea. Such tranquillity and 
monotony were not features of David's life. It 
fills a much larger space in the Bible thar any 
other—occupying as many as sixty-one chapters, 
though the history of Jacob is completed in eleven, 
and that of Abraham, the friend of God and father 
of the chosen race, in fourteen ; and, as one might 
safely infer from that circumstance, it is full of inte- 
resting and important incidents. Indeed his his- 
tory is one we should now-a-days call sensational ; 
being crowded with events almost more strange 


and stirring than are usually represented on the be ay : 






stage, or woven into the pages of romance. 


The curtain at its rising shows us a valley — seus 





DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 343 


among the quiet hills of Bethlehem, where a beau- 
tiful lad leads his snowy flock to the banks of a 
silent stream ; and sitting down on the sward be- 
neath the shadow ofa great rock, passes the time 
in meditation—now casting his thoughts into the 
form of poetry, and now pouring them forth in song 
to the music of his harp. A peaceful scene! but 
how suddenly it changes! A terrific roar, the fly- 
ing sheep, and a cry of pain startle the shepherd. 
Bounding from the thicket, a lion has seized a 
lamb, and is bearing it offin its bloody jaws. The 
stripling leaps to his feet ; and dropping the harp 
for his staff, throws himself in the path of the 
spoiler. They close in deadly combat—a lad 
against a lion. Stunned by a shower of blows, the 
savage beast drops its prey to throw himself witha 
roar on his brave antagonist. With a brief prayer 
to God, he seizes the lion by the beard, and strik- 
ing at the shaggy breast he offers, buries a knife in 
his heart ; lays him dead at his feet. 

The next scene presents a change breaking, like 
the rosy dawn, on David’s fortunes. Summoned 
from the flock, he returns to Bethlehem to find the 
whole town in a state of unusual excitement. 
Samuel, long the judge, and still the venerable 
prophet of Israel, has arrived there ; and its rulers, 
who furnish an illustration of the saying, ‘“‘ The 
wicked fleeth when no man pursueth,” conscious of 
guilt, dread that he has come to call them to 
account. His business is not with them; but with 
this youth, Jesse’s youngest son. Hitherto known 
only by the maidens of an obscure hill town for the 
beauty of his person, and among its shepherd lads 
for his manly bravery, David is to be called to fill 


344 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the throne. Saul was the choice of the people, but 
he is the choice of God. Modestly he enters the 
great man’s presence—wondering what he can 
have to do with him—and has no sooner appeared 
than the Lord says to Samuel, “‘ This is he ; arise, 
aneint him !’—and there, beside a smoking altar, 
agitatec by the new and strange emotions the vision 
of a sceptre raises, David is kneeling at the pro- 
phet’s feet, and in the oil poured on his golden 
locks receiving the investiture of a king. 

The next view shows us the path to his brilliant 
fortunes beginning to open. A messenger appears 
in Bethlehem, summoning him from the sheepfolds 
to the palace. Since the day the Spirit of the Lord 
left the king to abide on David, a darkness, like 
what falls on the earth when the sun deserts the 
sky, had fallen on the mind of Saul; and now, 
harp in hand, the stripling stands before the throne 
and its moody, gloomy occupant, to charm his ear 
with music, and with its soft and gentle magic to 
conjure the fiend away. But as a boat, though 
now raised high on their foaming crest, is soon lost 
to view in the trough of the waves, David, appa- 
rently the sport of fickle fortune, disappears once 
more into the obscurity of country life. He leaves 
the royal presence—happy probably to exchange 
a courtiers for a shepherd’s attire; and escape 
from the jealousies and contentions of a palace to 
his pipe and harp and simple home, to the little 
flock and quiet hills of Bethlehem. 

Again the scene shifts. Now he stands on the 
pinnacle of his fame ; the cynosure of all eyes ; his 
name familiar as a household word ; his story told 
by every hearth; the acknowledged saviour of his 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 345 


country, and the burden of its songs; the envy of 
her youths, and the admiration of her high-born 
and fairest maidens. Goliath has fallen to his sling ; 
the people go to gaze on the grim head that stands 
bleaching in the sun ; and the giant’s sword is hung 
in the house of God—a trophy, not so much of 
David’s powers, as that he who delivered him 
from the paw of the lion, and the paw of the bear, 
also delivered him from the hands of the Philistine. 

But as the waves of a flowing tide, though it ad- 
vances steadily on the naked sands as each curls 
and breaks, retreat back again into the bosom of 
the sea, so David’s fortunes seemed to flow and ebb. 
The son-in-law of Saul, the beloved friend of Jona- 
than, the first man at court, the leader of the host, 
the idol of the people, he appears in the next scene 
flung as by a sudden change of fortune into the 
very dust. A price lies on his head ; an outlaw no 
man dares to shelter, and whose fallen fortunes 
none follow but a few retainers in circumstances 
almost as desperate as his own, he is hunted, like a 
wild beast, from cave to cave, and hill to hill. 

Yet as when a storm with flashing lightnings, 
and peals that shake the heavens, and rains that 
swell the streams, disperses the loaded clouds and 
restores sunshine to the earth, events occur to pro- 
duce a favorable change in David’s circumstances. 
Fortune, as the world would say, smiles on him 
again. The fugitive of Engedi’s caves, the exile 
his country had cast out to seek protection trom 
its hereditary enemies, is called to the throne ot 
Judah. A few years more, and every rival dead 
and gone, the sceptre of Israel falls into his hand ; 
and retaining it till his grasp relaxes in death, he 


346 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


reigns sole monarch of a country among whose 
hills he had passed his youth as a shepherd, and 
in whose caves as a fugitive he had been often 
hiding for his life. 

A strange, what a happy fortune! I am not 
sure of that—a doubt that recalls a story illustra- 
tive of the happiness which may be enjoyed in 
humble life ; and also of the manner in which God 
sometimes, even in this world, crowns deeds of 
virtue, and makes the bread return which men in 
faith and kindness had cast on the waters. A cen- 
tury and more ago, a youth, impatient of control, 
left his native village and a widowed mother, who 
fell into sore poverty in the evening of her days. 
A humble neighbor, touched with pity, received 
her into his house ; shared with her the earnings of 
long hours and his busy shuttle ; assigned her the 
warmest corner at his fireside; honored her as a 
mother; nor ceased his kindness till he had laid 
her gray head in the grave. Long afterwards, a 
stranger, with furrowed brow and sun-browned face, 
appeared in the village. Having learned, in answer 
to his inquiries, the story of the widow and her 
benefactor, he repairs to the churchyard, and re- 
turns from her grave to seek the humble house in 
whose tenant she had found ason. The bread the 
cottager had cast on the waters returns in this 
stranger. He is the son who, long years ago, had 
left his mother to the care of others. Her bene- 
factor had two children, just then blooming into 
womanhood. He adopts them; and educating, en- 
dows them with the splendid fortune he had 
amassed in a distant land. One rose to be a 
countess, and, the object of a higher adoption, rose 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 347 


to the rank of an heir of grace; becoming as 
eminent for her piety in the church as for her 
position in the world. Yet, when raised to wealth 
and rank, she often said that these had never 
yielded such happiness as she enjoyed when, a sun- 
browned child, she herded her cattle on the lea, 
with larks singing above her head, and daisies 
springing at her naked feet. Similar, probably, 
was the experience of David. 

‘Covet the best gifts,” says the Apostle ; but let 
us not covet great earthly things, or turn an envious 
eye on their possessors, or forget in whatsoever 
state we are therewith to be content. The tops of 
the mountains are naked, and cold, and bare: the 
heights which ambition eyes and braces its limbs to 
climb, are often wrapt in clouds, chill with mists, 
white with snows, swept by storms and shattered 
by lightnings, from which the valleys lying at their 
feet are happily exempt. So David found to his 
painful experience. He reaches the throne ; but it 
is to recall with a melancholy pleasure the happy 
youth he spent under his father’s roof, and among 
the hills where, free from cares, he passed the live- 
long day with his harp and easy charge. 

‘* At ease reclined beneath the verdant shade, 
No more shall I behold my happy flock 
Aloft hang browsing on the tufted rock.” 

Taken from the sheepfolds to be a king, he bids 
farewell to ease, if not to peace of mind. His life 
gets crowded with events that tax his energies to 
the utmost—many, the result of his position, em- 
bittering with anxiety his days and nights; and 
some that sprang from the temptations to which he 
was peculiarly exposed, striking his soul with horror 


348 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


covering his head with the deepest shame. In de- 
fending or enlarging the borders of his kingdom, the 
sword is almost never out of his hand. He finds 
peace neither abroad nor at home. Domestic quar- 
rels wreck his happiness ; treachery lurks within the 
walls of the palace ; crimes are committed in the 
very bosom of his family that shock the land; acts 
where rebellion, rape, incest, adultery, and murder 
play their part, succeed each other on the stage— 
making his life, if one of the most interesting, the 
saddest recorded in the word of God. We have 
but to glance at the trials through which he passed 
to approve the title of this article, and understand 
the plaintive and dirge-like tones of many a psalm- 
Very different from that glorious scene where, 
under the eyes of the shouting host, he stands 
before Saul flushed with the excitement, and bear- 
ing in his hand the spoils of battle, one in reading 
these seems to see him in the solitude which sorrow 
courts; alone; an old and bowed-down man; 
crushed beneath a load of griet ; the tears dropping 
from his cheeks as he bends over his harp with 
faltering voice, and hands that tremble as they 
touch the strings. No man, not Job himself, had 
more reason to cry, ‘‘O my God, my soul is cast 
down within me; deep calleth unto deep at the 
voice of thy water-spouts ; all thy billows and thy 
waves are gone over me.” In some aspects expli- 
cable, in others inscrutably mysterious, there are 
scenes in this good man’s life which make one feel 
that he might have challenged the whole world, 
saying, ‘‘Behold and see if there be any sorrow 
like unto my sorrow !” 
Let us consider David's affictions. 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 349 


In the ills of poverty, the loss of children, the 
death of old friends, the numerous infirmities of 
age, troubles often gather around the prosperous in 
the decline of life, like clouds about a setting sun. 
Happy for them if these are sanctified: blessed by 
the Spirit of God to wean their affections from 
scenes they soon must leave, and prepare them, as 
trees which have the roots that bind them to earth 
loosened, for being transplanted to heaven! But 
unlike those who are long exempt from troubles, 
David and they were early acquaintances. Wher- 
ever there is sunshine there are shadows; and 
these fell coldly and early on his path. In conse- 
quence, probably, of his brothers having learned 
somewhat of the purpose of Samuel’s visit, he 
became the object of their bitter envy; of such 
jealousy as cost Joseph his liberty, and almost 
his life. Called from the flock to carry provisions 
to his brethren, he goes down to the host, 
to find them, and all Israel, panic-stricken. No 
man will face the giant. He will. Though a 
stripling, his faith and courage rise to the occa- 
sion. He turns to this soldier and to that, 
asking, ‘‘What shall be done to the man that 
killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the reproach 
from Israel ?” and ever as the question is answered, 
his soul swells higher with a divine indignation, till 
under a power within that impels him to accept 
the challenge, he breaks out in this exclamation, 
“Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he 
should defy the armies of the living God?” And 
what encouragement does he get from his brothers ? 
No thanks to them for that day’s work! They eye 
him with jealousy. Eliab, the eldest of them, 


350 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


wounds his feelings, and loads him with unmerited 
reproaches—‘‘ Why camest thou down hither?” he 
asks, ‘‘and with whom hast thou left those few 
sheep in the wilderness? I know thy pride and 
the naughtiness of thine heart!” Thus, like Jo- 
seph, and one greater still—like Jesus, he was 
wounded in the house of his friends. 

This was but the beginning of David’s sorrows. 
As the sun, on breaking through the haze to warm 
the air and shine in cloudless splendor, calls from 
their shades a swarm of insects, which pursue the 
traveller and pierce him with their stings, his pros- 
perity exposed David to a host of evils. It awoke 
feelings in Saul’s breast, not of envy only, but of the 
bitterest hatred. From the day that joyous mothers 
and maidens sang, ‘‘ Saul hath slain his thousands, 
but David his tens of thousands,” David was pur- 
sued with deadly animosity by him whose crown 
his valor had saved, and whose life he twice 
generously spared. The saviour of his country, no 
worse fate could have befallen its greatest enemy. 
He has to flee from the bosom of his family; he is 
driven from house and hold; dishonored as well 
as disgraced, his wife, the princess whom his courage 
won, is torn from his arms and given to another. 
Reduced to the most terrible straits, famine threat- 
ens him with death on this side, and the edge of the 
sword on that ; than savage deserts and mountain 
caves, other home has he none, nor bed but the bare 
ground, nor associates but men in debt, discon- 
tented, and in distress—a base and lawless crew, 
from whose society, in other and happier circum- 
stances, he had recoiled with disgust and horror. 

The heathen said that a good man suffering ad- 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 351 


versity well was a sight for the gods to look on. 
Such a sight is here. Some of his sweetest psalms, 
composed when he was huntcd like a partridge on 
the mountains, remain to testify to the indomitable 
fortitude and heavenly composure which David 
maintained amid a sea of troubles. He cuffered 
wrongs, nor sought to avenge them. He loved the 
country which had forsaken him ; nor, unlike most 
other outlaws, did he ever draw his sword but against 
its enemies. So hemmed in on all sides that, 
escape seeming as impossible as Saul remained im- 
placable, he once despaired, and cried, “I shall 
perish one day by the hand of Saul ;” yet, when 
his courage twice placed his enemy in his power, 
twice he spared him. He put aside the spear that 
gleamed in the moonlight above the sleeping king, 
and which Abishai had raised to bury in his heart ; 
and when at length Saul left the gloomy hut of 
Endor, to meet his fate in battle, this generous man, 
burying his enemy’s crimes and his own wrongs in 
one grave, lamented his fall, and avenged his death. 

Yet those afflictions he suffered, and suffered for 
years, at the hand of Saul, and of others also, were 
but the big drops that precede the storm. When 
Saul slept in his bloody grave, and he himself had ex- 
changed the caves of Engedi for a palace, and the 
hardships of an outlaw for the pomp and pleasures 
of a throne, it burst out on him in its wildest fury. 
Te many aman his home offers a quiet retreat from 
the battle and struggles of life—he forgets them at 
evening in the bosom of his family. Alas for 
David | his home was the scene of his most painful 
trials. Many foul crimes have defiled fair palaces, 
and murder has stained their floors with blood; 


352 STUDIES UF CHARACTER. 


but neither in robbers’ den nor in the lowest haunts 
of vice have worse deeds been done than wrecked 
the peace of David. Within walls sacred to the 
domestic virtues, to pure love, and the tenderest 
affections, his daughter stands before him, dis- 
honored and deflowered—her brother the author 
of this shocking crime. Who can fancy David's 
feelings when he looked on Tamar’s tears, and list- 
ened, with grief and consternation on his counte- 
nance, to a story that filled the whole land with 
horror? But hardly has that earthquake-shock 
passed away.when another follows. Tragedy on 
tragedy! The crimea father allowed to go unpun- 
ished her brother avenges. Biding his time, and, 
when suspicion is lulled, drawing Amnon, the per- 
petrator of that monstrous wickedness, into his toils, 
Absalom gives the signal, and, smitten by his 
servants, his brother dies. But ah! the sword that 
Absalom passed through Amnon’s body pierced 
David's heart. Was ever father so afflicted? Alas 
the day! Wails fill the palace; and there—a 
sadder sight than Job sitting beggared and childless 
on the grave of all his children—he rends his gar- 
ments ; and, struck down by the blow, falls pros- 
trate to the ground, his children standing around 
him dissolved in tears, and mingling their cries with 
his. 

He has to drink still deeper “‘of the wine of 
astonishment.” Hardly has time, the great healer, 
closed that wound, when Absalom, his favorite 
son, whom he had forgiven, inflicts a deeper one; 
commits a crime of yet darker dye. In reading 
how the Pope’s soldiers, to obtain speedy posses- 
sion of their jewels, were wont to sever the fingers 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 353 


of Huguenot ladies from their bleeding hands, I 
have wondered at the savage cruelty; but what 
cruelty, or crime, to be compared with his who, to 
possess himself the sooner of his father’s crown, 
sought to sweep off his father’s head? But for that 
bloody purpose Absalom, plying every traitorous 
art, poisoned the ears, and stole away the hearts of 
the people ; seduced his father’s soldiers and coun- 
cillors from their allegiance ; and sowed the sceds 
of discontent broadcast throughout the land. Now 
deeming things ripe for revolt, he drops the mask, 
and breaks out into open and monstrous rebellion. 
What sins too great for the man to commit whom 
God abandons, and the devil drives? Lost to 
shame, he publicly dishonors his father’s bed ; and 
has rewards for the assassin who will bring his gory 
gray head and lay it at his feet. We have seen 
many a sad sight ; but none to be compared to this 
aged monarch, full of honors and of years, worthy 
of all filial love and public veneration, who had no 
subject but should have fought, nor child but should 
have died for him, flying with a few followers, under 
the cloud of night, to escape the sword of his own 
son. And when tidings came of Absalom’s death, 
how terrible his grief! He wrings his hands, and, as 
he goes up to his chamber, ever and anon stops to 
raise his swimming eyes in mute appeal to heaven 
for pity, or give vent to the love and unutterable 
anguish of his broken heart, crying, ““O,; my son 
Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I 
had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my 
son!” 

The cause of his afflictions. 

Our springs and streams rise in wet, and fall in 

23 


354 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


dry weather. They are formed, and fed by rain; 
and thus when the river, on some day of unclouded 
sunshine, suddenly rises and swells till it roars in 
red flood ‘‘ between bank and brae,” we conclude 
that the mountains from which it descends have 
been bellowing with thunder, and deluged with 
showers of rain. Nor to any other cause than rain- 
fall do we attribute the springs and streams of those 
regions where, as in Egypt, for instance, snow never 
falls, nor even rain, for a long course of years. 
Though the-source of the Nile, and of those annual 
inundations to which Egypt, once the granary of 
Rome, owes its remarkable fertility, was long en- 
veloped in the profoundest mystery, it was never 
doubted that the cradle of that ancient river lay in 
some mountain region on which the loaded air dis- 
charged enormous quantities of snow orrain. Now 
as rain, however remote the place where it falls he 
from the river where it flows, or the fountain where 
it springs, is the source of.their waters, so, directly 
or indirectly, through an immediate or remote con- 
nection, all sorrow has its source in sin—‘ no sin no 
sorrow” is as true an adage as “no cross no 
crown.” 

The song of every bird, the happy gambols af 
every lambkin, the merry mazy dance of insects in 
the warm air of a summer evening, present God to 
us in an aspect of divine benignity—as taking plea- 
sure in all his works ; and, careful for the enjoyment 
of his meanest creatures, as filling their hearts with 
gladness. No heretics are further from the truth 
than those who regard the Divine Being as indif- 
ferent to the happiness of his creatures ; or as capa- 
ble of doing what no kind, no just, no upright judge 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 355 


would do—of punishing innocence, or laying afflic- 
tions on any one without cause. It is a canon of 
our courts of justice that it is better that nine guilty 
men should escape than that one innocent man 
should suffer ; and, as the spectre asked of Eliphaz, 
“Shall a mortal man be more just than God? 
Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?” He 
has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. And 
so far from regarding Him as, to use the words of 
the parable, “‘an austere man who taketh up what 
he laid not down, and reapeth what he did not sow,” 
I believe that man to be in some respects most like 
God whose greatest happiness is to make others 
happy. How can I believe else of Him who so 
loved the world as to give his only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, 
but have everlasting life? 

It is, I say, in no case God, but sin which is the 
source and cause of evil. This is the bitter fountain 
from which, directly or remotely, all sorrows flow ; 
and the simple reason why there is no sorrow in 
heaven, is that there is no sinthere. But while this 
is true, and the Fall, the sin of man in Eden, is the 
only key that opens to any extent whatever the 
mystery of world-wide suffering, men suffer many 
afflictions which cannot be traced directly and im- 
mediately to their sins. It is always well when we 
are afflicted to inquire whether there is any cause 
for the Lord having a controversy with us; at the 
same time Jesus warns us against the error of refer- 
ring every special suffering to some special sin. 
This were, like Job’s friends, to persecute him whom 
God has smitten, and talk to the grief of those whom 
He has wounded. “Think ye,” said our blessed 


356 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Lord, “that those eighteen upon whom the tower of 
Siloam fell, and slew them, were sinners above all] 
men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, nay; but 
except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” 
Meanwhile, the tares grow with the wheat, and not 
seldom grow the taller of the two; meanwhile, the 
goats go with the sheep, and climbing, according to 
their natural instincts, heights the others never 
reach, form often the most conspicuous part of the 
flock. It were a great mistake to suppose that the 
dispensations of Providence afford any infallible cri- 
terion by which to judge of our relationship, as 
friends or foes, to God—** Many are the afflictions 
of the righteous”—‘t Whom the Lord loveth He 
chasteneth, and scourgeth every son that He re 

ceiveth.” Blessed balm this to bleeding hearts; a 
truth graphically set forth in that story where piety, 
clad in rags, sits begging at the gate, while sin is 
clothed in purple and fine linen, and fares sumptu- 
ously every day ! 

Still—and let it be a warning both to saints and 
sinners—it often happens in the providence of God, 
and no doubt through divine intention, that men’s 
sins find them out. Justified through faith in the 
righteousness of Jesus Christ, his people are for- 
given the iniquity of their sin ; yet they are made 
to smart for it. Their sin produces suffering, and 
the suffering reminds them of their sin—the connec- 
tion between the two being not remote but direct,— 
manifest as that between drunkenness and rags ; 
between theft and a prison; between debauchery 
and an impaired constitution ; between a woman's 
fall from the paths of virtue and her loss of place, 
and character, and honest bread. 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 357 


In this light David presents one of the most re- 
markable beacons ever set up to warn the unwary ; 
and teach him ‘‘ that thinketh he standeth to take 
heed lest he fall.” Was his house rent asunder by 
domestic quarrels ? Was it the scene of crimes such 
as have seldom broken a father’s heart, or stained 
the purity and wrecked the peace of families? It 
may seem a great mystery to some how so gooda 
man should have been so sorely tried. But jt is no 
mystery. Hereapedashe had sowed. Ifa second 
wife and a second family often breed discord among 
ourselves, with a plurality of wives—numbering at 
least seven or eight—David had nothing else than 
dispeace to look for. His domestic troubles were 
the price he paid for the pleasures of polygamy— 
for disregarding the ancient law of Eden, and in- 
dulging in a practice which has proved the curse of 
every country where it prevailed. The offspring of 
different mothers, and inflamed by their jealousies, 
envyings, rivalries, and other bad passions, his 

children neither did, nor could regard each other 
with the affection to which we owe the peace and 
purity of our Christian homes. Hence the troubles 
that distracted, and the crimes that disgraced his 
house. In these his sin found him out. 

This retribution was still more painfully, and not 
less plainly exemplified in the unnatural and mon- 
strous rebellion of Absalom. It may be traced to 
his sin in the matter of Bathsheba. In that crime 
he sowed the wind, in this rebellion he reaps 
the whirlwind—the death of the child, the fruit of 
their guilty love, being but the beginning, and the 
least, of all the sorrows of which his adultery was 
the fatal source. Bathsheba may not be known to 


vA 


358 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


many but as the wife of Uriah—that gallant soldier 
whose fate is so pitiful, and whose murder, planned 
with the coolest deliberation, and accomplished by 
the basest treachery, is David’s blackest crime ; one 
that constrains us to exclaim, ‘‘ Lord, what is man ?” 
“‘Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils : 
for wherein is he to be accounted of?” But on ex- 
amining the Scriptures we find something more 
about this woman of fatal beauty and too easy 
virtue—whose simplest effort to fly, Joseph-like, 
from temptation might have recalled the king to 
his senses and his saintship ; saving both from a load 
of guilt, and a sea of troubles. 

It appears from one genealogy that Bathsheba 
was the daughter of Eliam, and from another that 
her father Eliam was the son of Ahithophel, the 
Gilonite, David’s counsellor. This near relationship 
between Bathsheba and Ahithophel throws a flood 
of light on Absalom’s rebellion; for what more 
likely than that through means of that, Ahithophel 
sought vengeance for the wrongs which, in the 
double crime of adultery and murder, the king had 
committed against him and his house? Revenge 
is a strong passion in all, but especially in the 
bosom of eastern nations. There, concealed under 
smiling and specious appearances, it will lie burn- 
ing for long years—like the fires of a volcano under 
the purple vineyards, and fair flowers, and umbra- 
geous forests that clothe the mountain’s side. 
Ahithophel’s vindictive passions found their tool in 
Absalom ; and their time when, like the pent-up 
fires of a volcano, the rebellion burst out. He lent 
it those extraordinary talents which constituted 
him David's ablest statesman, and led men to say 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 359 


that “the counsel of Ahithophel was as if a man 
had inquired at the oracle of God.” With a 
devilish craft, for the purpose of making reconci- 
liation between the father and son impossible, he 
counselled the shameless outrage that Absalom 
perpetrated on the royal concubines. The imme- 
diate pursuit, which would have crowned the revolt 
with success, was also his sagacious but bloodthirsty 
advice. He it was who fanned the fames of ambi- 
tion in Absalom’s bosom; he steeled his heart 
against the relentings which would otherwise have 
stayed his hand. In this man, whom he had 
deeply wronged, David saw the head, and front, 
and mainspring of the conspiracy. Thus God re- 
minded him of his crimes, and showeau him his sin 
in its punishment. His case presents a remark- 
able example of how long sin, so far as its effects 
are concerned, may slumber ere it breaks out—like 
a fire that, smouldering days and nights in some 
beam, at length bursts into flame, and reduces the 
fairest pile to a blackened ruin and a heap of smok- 
ing ashes. 

If, like David, we are compelled to trace our 
sufferings to our sins, what a weight does that 
add to the load! Let us pray God, that, while He 
forgives their iniquity for Christ’s sake, and takes 
away their guilt through his blood, he would not 
visit us for our sins. If we are to suffer, may it 
not be for sins, but for righteousness’ sake! A 
light load that—a fortune we should neither greatly 
dread nor deprecate. In words illustrated hy those 
heroic spectacles of martyrdom where the saints 
praised God in prisons, took joyfully the spoiling 
of their goods, embraced the stake, and stretched 


360 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


out their hands with good, brave old Latimer to 
bathe them in its rising flames, Jesus says, “ Blessed 
are ye when men shall persecute you, and shall 
say all manner of evil falsely against you for my 
sake; rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is 
your reward in heaven.” 

The use and profit of his afflictions. 

When Queen Mary, by her marriage, was about 
to plunge herself and the kingdom of Scotland into 
dark and bloody trouble, Knox publicly condemned 
the step. For this she summoned the bold Re- 
former to her presence, complained bitterly of his 
conduct, and saying, ‘‘I vow to God LI shall be 
revenged,” burst into a flood of tears. Waiting till 
she had composed herself, he proceeded calmly to 
make his defence. It was triumphant; but pro- 
duced no other effect on Mary than to exasperate 
her passions. Again she began to sob, and weep 
with great bitterness. While Erskine, the friend of 
both, and a man of mild and gentle spirit, tried to 
mitigate her grief and resentment by praising her 
beauty and accomplishments, Knox continued 
silent—waiting with unaltered countenance till the 
queen had given vent to her feelings. Then ex- 
plaining how he was constrained to sustain her 
tears rather than hurt his conscience and by his 
silence betray the commonwealth, he protested 
that he never took delight in the distress of any 
creature; and that so far from rejoicing in her 
majesty’s tears, it was with great difficulty he 
could see his own boys weep when he corrected 
them for their faults. 

In this beautiful expression we see the feelings of 
every father ; and in these a faithful, though feeble, 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 361 


reflection of the kind heart of God. In no case 
does He afflict his people willingly ; and always for 
their good. 

‘““We have had fathers of our flesh,” says an 
apostle, “‘which corrected us, and we gave them 
reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjec- 
tion unto the Father of our spirits, and live? For 
they verily for a few days chastened us after their 
own pleasure, but He for our profit, that we might 
be partakers of his holiness.” A glorious object ; 
and what precious consolation to his people—to 
them we may address the words of the prophet: 
*‘O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not 
comforted!” Why not comforted? God beats his 
people, but it is to make them better; nor when 
blow follows on the back of blow, are their trials 
other than the strokes of the flail on a threshing- 
floor—it falls not to bruise the grain, but to sepa- 
rate the chaff from the wheat. Deep no doubt 
were the sorrows that wounded, the anguish that 
tore David’s heart—“I am poor and needy,” he 
cries ; ‘‘my heart is wounded withinme. Iamgone 
like the shadow when it declineth. My soul is full 
of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the 
grave. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit; in 
darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon 
me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. 
Lord, why castest thoy off my soul? Why hidest 
thou thy face from me? Iam afflicted, and ready 
to die.” Yet in all this, in David’s as in every such 
case, God afflicted not willingly. 

And how his gracious purpose was accomplished 
in the Psalmist’s afflictions, may be seen, for in- 
stance, in the sorrow, and even horror, with which 


362 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


he regarded his saddest fall. His bitterest enemies 
could not have exposed, nor his dearest friends 
lamented, it more than he did himself. Never 
man was less like those whom a prophet addresses, 
saying: “‘Hearken unto me, ye stout-hearted !” 
He was not stout-hearted. He lies prostrate in the 
dust, both before God and man—concealing no- 
thing; offering no excuse, or palliation; his grief, 
as expressed in the 51st Psalm, not grief but agony. 
If for a time his heart seemed a flinty rock, struck 
by a power mightier than the rod of Moses, it pours 
forth a torrent of tears, and prayers, and the 
deepest sorrow. ‘‘ Have mercy upon me, O God,” 
he cries, “according to thy loving-kindness; ac- 
cording to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot 
out my transgressions. Purge me with hyssop, 
and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be 
whiter than snow. Cast me not away from thy 
presence ; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. 
Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God 
of my salvation !” 

Affliction proved, in his case, as in many others, 
the greatest preacher. Brought through it and the 
grace of God to a deep sense of the insufficiency 
of the world, and of the evil of sin, led thereby to 
earnest prayer, with strong crying and tears, for 
pardon, no wonder he said, ‘‘It was good for me 
that I was afflicted.” But his afflictions have been 
good also for the Church. She owes not a few of 
his most prized and precious psalms to the afflic- 
tions that brought out the noblest features of his 
character, as the darkness of night does the stars, 
the crushing of some flowers their latent odors, 
and fire the shining metal which lies concealed in 


1 


DAVID THE AFFLICTED MAN. 363 


the earthy ore. We had been great losers if David 
had not been greatly afflicted. Inthese psalms he 
points us to our refuge in times of trouble ; and 
furnishes us with language to express the wishes 
and relieve the burden of our hearts. So long as’ 
men have wounds to heal, and war with sin to 
wage, and faults to confess, and forgiveness to seek, 
and trials to endure, and death to face, so long will 
his words ascend to the ear of God, from spiritual 
battle-fields and domestic altars, from praying- 
* closets and beds of death. 

The greatest of ali afflictiem, as has been justly 
said, is an unblessec affliction. On the other 
hand, let the Holy Spirit, in answer to prayer, tur 
them into the means of our sanctification, and 
there are no greater mercies. How many, when 
they became poor in this world, have grown rich 
toward God! How many have found life in the 
death of dear ones! How many, by being brought 
to weep over a broken cistern, have turned their 
trembling steps to the fountain of living water! 
and when God sent storms to wreck their earthly 
happiness, how many ‘‘on the broken pieces of the 
ship” have reached the shore in safety! No chas- 
tening for the present is joyous, but grievous; yet 
let us not shrink from its pain, since our blessed 
Lord makes use of it to work out the peaceable 
fruits of righteousness. The harrow that tears up 
the bosom of the soil, laying it open to heavenly 
influences, to the showers and sunshine of the sky, 
brings joy in harvest. Soshallit be with afflictions. 
Bitter frosts, by means of which God kills the 
weeds our hearts are so ready to throw up—thorns 
he lays on our pillow to prevent us spending our 


304 STUDIES OF CHAKACTER. 


lives in sleep—sharp spurs, without whose touch 
most would make slow progress in the way to 
heaven ;—afflictions are of the greatest advantage 
to God’s people. They teach us the vanity of the 
world; they call us to our senses; they remind us 
of our sins; they give depth to repentance; they 
give fervor to love; they give wings to prayer ; 
and they quicken our longings, and, with them, our 
preparation for that happy wold, where there is no 
death, nor sickness, nor sin, nor soriuw, and Jesus 
wipes away all tears from all ey-s. 


\ SOLUMON THE WISE MAN. 365 


Solomon ihe Wise Ban. 
PART I. 


LET us ascend the stream of time, and transport 
ourselves to Jerusalem some three thousand years 
ago. Its most characteristic features now are 
mean and ignoble buildings; silent streets; signs 
of decay and oppression and squalid poverty ; and 
a miserable remnant of its ancient race, haunting 
its walls like ghosts, and filling the air with their 
plaintive wails. Unlike Rome, or Athens, or 
Thebes, Jerusalem hardly retains, even in its ruins, 
a vestige of departed glory. But at the date I 
speak of, it was a picturesque and magnificent city. 
The mountains around it were clothed with 
gardens, and cornfields, and fat olive-groves, and 
terraced vineyards, and clumps of feathery palms ; 
its streets were the abodes of luxury and ease, or 
filled with the hum of business and crowds of 
traffickers, who brought to its markets the varied 
products of distant climes—Egypt’s finest fabrics 
and India’s costliest wares; and with the royal 
palace—a building at once of great magnificence 
and prodigious strengtt—crowning the heights of 
Zion, and looking over the city, with its sparkling 
fountains, and gardens, and net work of streets, and 
stately edifices, to Moriah, where the temple rose, 


66 STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


dazzling the eye, and glittering, as the smoke of 
early sacrifice ascended in the calm blue air, with 
gold in the beams of the morning sun; city of the 
living God, Jerusalem was then, as the Jews 
proudly called it, the ‘“‘ perfection of beauty, the joy 
of the whole earth.” 

Having transported ourselves there, we mingle 
with a crowd that waits before the palace. Its 
gates at length are thrown open; the throng 
divides like a parted wave, making way for a 
stately chariot which advances, drawn by splendid 
horses, carpeted with the costliest tapestry of the 
loom, and bedecked with silver and gold and 
purple. Around it is a bodyguard of chosen men, 
the tallest and bravest of the land: each arrayed 
in purple, with his long black locks sprinkled with 
gold dust ; in his hand a drawn sword, and on his 
ieft arm a golden shield. A proud array! and in 
che centre of it, seated in his chariot, is the object 
vhe people crowd and push and stand on tiptoe to 
see—the cynosure of all eyes. His raiment is 
white as snow: health blooms on his ruddy cheek: 
adown his broad shoulders fall bushy locks, dark as 
the raven’s wing ; with features cast in the finest 
mould, eyes of the brightest blue, intellect beaming 
in his look, grace and fascination in all his bearing, 
he sits there a king of men, “every inch a king ”— 
to copy the description of the sacred writers, 
his lips were full of grace ; his countenance was as 
Lebanon; his soul was anointed with the oil of 
gladness ; without a peer or rival, he was fairer 
than the sons of men. Followed by a splendid 
retinue, and attended by kings, who had come in 
regal pomp and with costly gifts ‘to hear the 


SOLOMUN THE WISE MAN. 367 


wisdom that God had put into his heart,” this was 
Solomon. Thus, like a comet sweeping through 
the sky with its long train of brilliant light, Solo- 
- mon, as we gather from Josephus, as well as from 
the sacred records, was wont to appear in public; 
thus he went to dispense justice in the hall of judg- 
ment, or pass his leisure with a train of female 
beauties in his enchanting garden at Etham—his 
paradise, as it was called. 

Of all the kings of the earth, none during his life 
ever attracted so much notice as Solomon, or left 
behind him at his death such a wide-spread and 
immortal memory. Not the queen of Sheba only, 
who, on hearing “‘ of his fame concerning the name 
of the Lord, came to prove him with hard-ques- 
tions,” but many others, to whose kingdoms his 
fame had reached, repaired to Jerusalem—curious 
as Moses when, amazed to see a bush burning 
without being consumed, he said, ‘‘I will turn aside 
and see this great sight.” The splendor of his 
reign, like all earthly greatness, has passed away 
as a theatrical pageant from the stage. Its very 
theatre, indeed, is now a melancholy ruin. The 
plowshare of war has gone over Jerusalem, nor 
left any traces of the glory it enjoyed under 
Solomon but a few great stones, where the dis- 
persed of Israel, aliens in their fatherland, weep as 
mourners at the graves and by the monuments of 
the dead. Not only so; but our Lord, taking away 
that glare about the state of kings and pomp of 
wealth that is so dazzling to the weak eyes of 
mortals, has given us the true measure of Solomon’s 
glory. A flower of the meadow his text, and hig 
sermon the shortest but most impressive eve 


368 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


preached on the verdict, ‘‘ Vanity, vanity, all i: 
vanity,” Jesus said to his disciples, ‘‘ Consider the 
‘lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, 
neither do they spin ; and yet I say unto you, that 
even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
one of these.” 

That is true; and three thousand years have 
passed since he died—sweeping millions into obli- 
vion, obliterating the footprints of kings and 
conquerors, and crumbling their proudest tomb- 
stonesintodust. Yet the fame of Solomon survives 
He still lives in many an eastern story ; and where 
dusky forms beneath a sky sparkling with stars, 
sit round the lonely tent fire, they while away the 
night with strange legends of his wisdom, and glory, 
and greatness. 

Those who are conversant with the literature of 
Persia tell us that he is one of its most frequent 
and famous characters. It records nothing of 
David, but countless stories of his son: one, called 
the ‘‘Saluman-Nameh,” occupies no fewer than 
eighty books. The Persians also show a tomb at 
Shiraz, which they pretend to be Bathsheba’s ; and 
not to any of their own kings, but to Solomon be- 
longs the honor, according to the common legend, 
of having built the once magnificent city of Perse- 
polis. 

A more important place still belongs to Solomon 
in the hoary traditions of that country, amid whose 
mountain fastnesses our army, by endurance, valor 
in the fight, and clemency in the victory, lately 
crowned itself anew with laurels. Abyssinia claims 
him as the founder of its imperial dynasty! and in 
Theodore holding the pass single handed, deserted 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 369 


of all but his own lion-like courage, fell, according 
to the traditions of the country, a descendant of 
Solomon and the queen of Sheba. The story goes 
that she bore a sonto him, and took the boy with 
her to her own country, where he lived to become 
the ancestor of a long line of kings ; and that from 
the thousands of Hebrews who accompanied her on 
her return, sprung the large body of Jews who are 
now found in Abyssinia, and whose conversion to 
Christianity was the object of that enterprise of 
Stern, the missionary, which formed one at least of 
the causes of the late Abyssinian war. As many 
cities contended for the honor of being the birth- 
place of Homer, other countries besides Abyssinia 
—Arabia, for instance—have claimed the queen of 
Sheba for their sovereign, and Solomon for the 
father of their kings. 

Nor has his name been preserved only in the his- 
toric legends and oral traditions of those countries, 
like Arabia, Persia, and Ethiopia, that bordered on 
his own dominions, or were allied to him by some 
closerconnection. The remotest corners of Europe 
had legends of Solomon; and equally among Jewish, 
Christian, and Mahometan nations his name forms 
a nucleus around which have gathered the strangest 
and most fantastic fables. No man ever left so 
broad and deep a mark on the world as the subject 
ofthis chapter. The Peak of Teneriffe stands 14,000 
feet above the level of the sea; and sailors tell us 
at what an enormous distance it is descried, and 
over how many leagues of ocean, with its feet below 
the waves and its head above the clouds, it flings 
its long shadow. Such a place Solomon filled ir 
the world. Those who never heard of Cyrus, or 


370 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Alexander, or the Czsars, have heard of him. His 
name belongs to more tongues, and his shadow has 
fallen farther, and over a larger surface of the earth, 
than any other man’s. 

And to what is this mainly due ? 

——~“He was, no doubt, a great monarch, in the ordi- 
nary acceptation of the term—among the greatest 
that ever filled a throne. Other empires have 
embraced a larger surface of the earth than his ; 
yet, the fruit not of his own wars but of his father’s, 
his dominions were of vast extent. They reached 
from Egypt, and the borders of the Philistines, 
eastward to the Euphrates, and southward as far 
as the head of the Red Sea. The most powerful of 
the existing dynasties were his allies—the Pharaohs 
who occupied the old throne of Egypt, and also the 
sovereigns of that enterprising Phenician race, whose 
ships braved the dangers of unknown seas ; whose 
merchants, ike our own, were princes, and whose 
traffickers were the honorable of the earth. Under 
the lofty dome of St. Paul’s we read these words of 
its architect: “If you seek my monument, look 
around ;” and in Jerusalem Solomon had such a 
monument of his greatness. It was said of Augustus 
Cesar, that he found Rome brick, and made it 
marble ; but Jerusalem—and the country as well as 
its capital—owed still more to the enterprise and 
vigor of Solomon. He threw a wall around it of 
prodigious height and strength ; and the city that 
wall defended he adorned with the most magni- 
ficent edifices. He built a palace for himself of 
such splendor and dimensions that, though he had 
thousands of workmen, in the Canaanites whom he 
pressed into his service, it took thirteen years to 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 371 


construct. He built a second palace, which formed 
the hall of judgment, and was called, probably from 
the enormous quantity of cedar used in its con- 
struction, the House of the Forest of Lebanon ; 
and another still for Pharaoh’s daughter, her, the 
chief of his too numerous wives, whom he married 
on succeeding to the throne. Besides these, after 
designs and with treasures left by his father David 
—who, because he was a man of blood, one whose 
life, in other words, had been spent in wars, was 
denied the privilege of raising a house to the God 
of peace—he built the Temple. That sacred 
edifice, which he began in the fourth, and finished 
in the eleventh year of his reign, was of un- 
rivalled splendor ; for its size the costliest which 
wealth and piety ever raised to the worship of 
God. It is calculated that the talents of gold 
and of silver which are recorded as having been 
left by David for this purpose were equal in 
value to the eight hundred millions that form the 
national debt of our country. No wonder that a 
building on which such treasures were lavished 
should have excited more of the world’s attention 
than all the temples of India or Egypt, of Greece 
or Rome; cast a flood of glory on the reign of 
Solomon ; and is recalled to this day by Jews in 
every quarter of the world with mingled feelings of 
pride and sorrow. 

Nor was it only palaces, or even cities—such as 
Tadmor in the desert, afterwards called Palmyra, 
whose lonely and beautiful ruins still attract the 
steps and excite the admiration of travellers—that 
Solomon built. In alliance with Hiram, king of 
Tyre, the capital of Phenicia, he built ships ; com: 


372 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


bining the merchant with the prince. With the 
exception of the “glorious gospel of the blessed 
God,” commerce has done more to preserve the 
peace of the world, and promote the civilization 
and happiness of its inhabitants, than any other 
influence whatever. Though some affect to despise 
it, there is no pursuit more honorable ; and deem- 
ing it worthy not of nobles only but of kings, 
Solomon built mercantile navies at Elath and also 
at Eziongeber. These were ports on the coast of 
Edom, a country subdued by his father’s arms and 
the power of prayers like these—‘‘ Who will bring 
me into the strong city? Who will lead me into 
Edom? Wilt not thou, O God, go forth with our 
hosts? through God we shall do valiantly ; for he 
it is that shall tread down our enemies.” 

From these harbors, lying on the Atlantic Gulf 
of the Red Sea, Solomon's ships sailed to the coasts 
of Arabia, India, Ceylon, returning with rich freights 
—gold and silver and precious stones ; nard, aloes, 
sandal-wood, and ivory ; apes and peacocks. Nor 
did his greatness appear only in naval enterprises 
conducted in that quarter of the world. He 
launched his vessels on the waters of the Mediter- 
ranean. His and Hiram’s ships made voyages to 
Tarshish, a region lying somewhere on the coasts 
of Spain ; and farther still. Bold sailors, the Phe- 
nicians pushed their way through the Gates of 
Hercules, as the Straits of Gibraltar were then 
called. Braving the terrors of the Atlantic, they 
steered for the south-west extremity of our own 
island, which was regarded by them as a group of 
islands, and called the Isles of the Cassirides. They 
came to Cornwall for tin—the metal which com- 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 373 


bined with copper formed the bronze so largely 
used by the ancients both for armor and domestic 
purposes, and so often mentioned in their writings, 
both sacred and profane, under the name of brass. 
This composite metal entered largely into the fur- 
niture of the Jewish temple; and while there was 
thus a very old and interesting connection between 
our own country and the land of God’s chosen 
people, to me it imparted additional interest to the 
bold headlands and picturesque bays of Cornwall, 
to think that its hills and streams supplied mate- 
rials for the house of God, and that Solomon’s ships 
ploughed the very sea that swelled and broke in 
foaming rollers at our feet. 

In this commerce which Solomon carried on we 
have one of the sources of the enormous wealth 
which contributed materially to his fame, and led 
to the saying that ‘‘ King Solomon passed all the 
kings of the earth in riches.” But he had other, 
and no less productive, sources of revenue: First, 
for instance, the tax he raised on the products of 
the East, as they passed, which they required to do, 
through his territories—one caravan travelling by 
Edom to Egypt, the other by Tadmor in the desert 
to Asia Minor and Europe; secondly, the tribute 
vaid by princes, who held their provinces at his 
f.easure, or by independent sovereigns, who pur- 
chased his countenance and alliance with costly gifts 
—“‘all the kings of the earth,” it is said, ‘‘sought the 
presence of Solomon, and they brought every man 
his present, vessels of silver and vessels of gold and 
raiment, harness and spices, horses and mules, a rate 
year by year ;” and thirdly, the taxes he imposed 
on the property and commerce of his subjects: and 


374 STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


how heavy these became, at least in the lattes 
years of his reign, may be inferred from the circum- 
stance that they bred rebellion, and were the chief 
causes of the revolt that rent the kingdom asunder 
in the days of his son Rehoboam. Besides all 
these sources of revenue, Solomon succeeded to 
enormous treasures, over and above those expended 
on the Temple ; the fruits and spoils of his father’s 
wars. Josephus tells us that wealth of incredible 
value was stored up in David’s sepulchre ; where, 
since it was neither exhausted by the lavish expen- 
diture of his son nor by the plundering hand of 
Hyrcanus, who, according to that historian, robbed 
it of three thousand talents of gold, it may yet be 
found—if any are so fortunate as to discover what 
has been often sought, but always in vain, the dust 
and tomb of David. 

It is impossible now to form a correct estimate 
of the wealth of Solomon; but certain details which 
are recorded in Scripture, and recall the fabulous 
magnificence of Mexican and Peruvian kings, help 
us to fancy how great it was, and how fully God 
made good his promise, that since Solomon had 
asked neither wealth, nor long life, nor conquest 
over his enemies, but wisdom, He would give him 
that and these besides. Take these as examples. 
The walls, the doors, the very floor of the Temple, 
were plated with gold, furnishing gorgeous imagery 
for John’s description of heaven. It appeared every- 
where else in munificent profusion. Two hundred 
targets and three hundred shields of beaten gold 
blazed on the arms of the stately guard that lined 
the way when Solomon repaired to the Temple, or 
to the House of the Forest. His throne, constructed 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 375 


of ivery, was overlaid with plates of pure gold, a. 
were the steps that ascended it. Throwing into 
shade and meanness the proudest displays of 
modern palaces on high days of festival,—‘‘all the 
drinking vessels of Solomon were of gold, and all 
the vessels of the House of the Forest were of pure 
gold—none were of silver ;” as to it, it was socom- 
mon in his days that “‘it was nothing accounted of,” 
says the sacred writer—‘“‘the king made silver to 
be in Jerusalem as stones.” To hear some pale 
preacher, whom his people leave to struggle with 
straitened circumstances, depreciating what he never 
possessed, discoursing with touching eloquence on 
the worthlessness of wealth, and how unfit riches 
are to satisfy either the aspirations of an immortal 
or allay the terrors of a guilty soul, may not im- 
press us ; but, in taking leave of Solomon’s great- 
ness and wealth, let me observe that here isa scene 
which should. What more striking than the spec- 
tacle of this royal preacher, rising up amid scenes 
of the most imposing grandeur, surrounded by 
everything the world desires, and pronouncing over 
them all this sweeping, this solemn, this mournful 
verdict : “ Vanity, vanity, and vexation of spirit !” 
How should that lead us to set our affections on 
things above, and lend our ears to another voice— 
to Him, the Amen, the Faithful and the True Wit- 
ness, who, freely offering pardon, and peace through 
his own precious blood, addresses us, saying, “‘I 
counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, 
that thou mayest be rich !” 

Surpassing all the kings of the earth in riches, 
it was not these which made Solomon famous. 
‘A man shall be commended,” says the proverb, 


276 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


“according to his wisdom ;” and his own fame pre 
sents the best possible illustration of that, his own 
proverb. Cabinets of natural history possess speci- 
mens of insects that lived, probably, ages before 
the creation of man; and there I have seen them, 
inside a piece of transparent, fragrant, golden amber, 
as perfect in every limb, feeler, silken wing, and 
member of their delicate forms, as on the day they 
died. The amber in which Solomon’s memory has 
been embalmed was his unrivalled wisdom. It is 
for that he is remembered, and his name preserved 
in the many thousand eastern legends that history 
has written and oral tradition tells concerning 
him. 

It may interest, if not instruct, my readers to 
have some specimens of these. Here is a sample 
of the sack. He could interpret the speech of 
beasts and birds; and was acquainted with the 
hidden virtues of gems and herbs. He knew spells 
to cast out demons, and charms to cure disease— 
and some of these, attributed to Solomon, are used 
to this day in the East. He was possessed of a 
ring which revealed to him the past, the present, 
and the future ; and when this was stolen by Ash- 
medai, the king of the demons, he fell, it is said, 
into great sorrow, and wandered throughout all the 
land of Israel, weeping and crying, “‘I, the preacher, 
was the King of Jerusalem.” He was acquainted 
with the arts of magic; and by these obtained such 
power over evil spirits that they became his slaves, 
and transported from India, among other and more 
important services, those rare trees that adorned 
his famous garden at Etham. He built the splendid 
city of Persepolis by the aid of certain demons, 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 377 


called Jinns; while he conquered another and re- 
bellious class, named Afreets, after a longstruggle, 
and imprisoned them in the depths and dark caves 
- of the sea. 

Other legends, like the Bible story of the two 
women who disputed for possession of the living 
child, present illustrations of his sagacity ; of the 
promptitude and profundity of his wisdom—how it 
stood every test, and triumphed in every trial. On 
one occasion, for example, a band of fair boys and 
stout girls, of one size and age, and all dressed 
alike, were brought to him; and, to test his skill, 
he was required to say which were boys and which 
girls. He broke in a moment through the maze. 
Ordering water to be brought, he directed them all 
to wash ; and observing, as they washed, how one 
class vigorously scrubbed, while another, careful of 
their beauty, but gently stroked their faces with the 
water, he solved the enigma—unhesitatingly and 
instantly pronouncing the first to be boys, and the 
second girls. On another occasion, one who came, 
like the Queen of Sheba, to prove his wisdom as 
well as to see his glory, brought some flowers, re- 
quiring him to say whether they were real or arti- 
ficial. If they were works of art, the imitation of 
tint, of size, of color, and of form, was so perfect 
as to deceive the sight, and defy all ordinary 
means of detection. But no art could baffle Solo- 
mon’s sagacity. It suggests an unerring test. He 
desires the flowers to be placed on the ground. 
The air is filled with the hum of bees as they flit 
in search of honey from flower to flower. He 
watches the course of one as it approaches the 
flowers that were to put his wisdom to the proof 


378 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


It brushes their leaves, but passes by on careless 
wing, nor stays its flight for a moment to hover 
over them. Satisfied with this test, he pronounces 
them false ; leaving the maker of the flowers and 
the spectators of the trial, in their ignorance of 
his shrewd, though simple, test, amazed at his 
sagacity. 

Such, as we find them in the traditions, oral or 
written, of the East, are the many thousand legends 
of which the subject of this chapter is the hero; and 
it will be observed that wild, extravagant, and even 
ridiculous as some of them appear, they all turn 
on his wisdom. His wisdom is the foundation on 
which the superstructure stands, however puerile 
and fantastic it may be; and this, I may remark, 
presents a phase of human nature which is credit- 
able to it, and sheds some faint rays of glory on 
the ruins of our humanity. Though fallen, men 
are not fallen so low as in their calm and unbiased 
judgment to esteem the possession of wealth above 
that of wisdom ; or think that riches gives any one 
a title to their respect while he lives, or to their 
remembrance when he dies. While mere wealth 
wins no respect for its possessor, and leaves his 
memory to rot and sink into the oblivion of the 
grave, Solomon’s wisdom survives in these legends, 
and bearing his name over all the East, has floated 
it down to successive generations. There was no 
ground therefore for his gloomy forebodings, his 
complaint, “‘ As it happeneth to the fool, so it hap- 
peneth even unto me; and why was I then more 
wise, seeing that which now is in the days to come 
shall all be forgotten?” This wisest man, as well 
as greatest enigma in history ; this weakest of mor- 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 376 


als, who yet filled the world with his fame; this 
type of Jesus Christ—the peace, and riches, and 
glory of whose kingdom were symbolized by his— 
- who yet in the matter of his salvation offers doubts 
divines have never solved, is not forgotten. His 
fame remains forever embalmed in the memory of 
his unrivalled wisdom. That we shall discuss in 
our next chapter; only observing, meanwhile, 
that his strange and inconsistent conduct, the 
gross sensuality that stained his life, and the 
dark cloud that in consequence hangs above 
his tomb, are singularly instructive. It is na- 
tural for us to regard with respect great in- 
tellect and practical wisdom; penetrating saga- 
city and boundless stores of knowledge; all 
those mental qualities which command admiration, 
and secure a place for their possessor in the 
temple of fame. Yet how does Solomon’s history 
teach us that the wisdom which maketh wise 
to salvation and to win souls to Christ, that the 
wisdom which esteems the knowledge of God him- 
self of greater value than the profoundest know 
ledge of his works, that the wisdom which in many 
an unlettered peasant has aspired to this blessed 
and lofty attainment, “ Acquaint thyself with God 
and be at peace,” is that of which it can be most 
justly and emphatically said, “‘ With all thy getting, 
get wisdom—the merchandise of it is better than 
the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof 
than fine gold.” What shall it profit a man though 
he were as wise as Solomon, and rich as Crcesus, 
though he should gain the whole world, if he lose 
his soul ? 


380 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Solomon the Wise Ban. 
PART II. 


WISER than him who said, “‘ Experience teaches 
fools”—a lying proverb, that has got, like bad 
money, into circulation—Solomon says, “ Though 
thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among 
wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness 
depart from him.” To their own loss, and that also 
of others, who have the misfortune to be connected 
with them, such persons go blundering, stumbling, 
floundering on through life, being, to use a com- 
mon expression, no sooner out of one scrape than 
they fall into another. Yet there is a case more 
hopeless than theirs. ‘‘Seest thou a man,” says 
Solomon, “ wise in his own conceit ?—there is more 
hope of a fool than of him.” 

The converse of this is equally true; all expe- 
rience proving what youth especially should give 
heed to, that modesty is the sure pathway to 
merit, and humility the foundation of all true great- 
ness. Access to other kingdoms besides heaven 
is not to be obtained but according to the beautiful 
lesson our Lord taught wrathful and wrangling 
disciples. To abash their self-conceit and rebuke 
their vanity, He called a little child, and setting 
the gentle, modest, blushing boy in the midst of 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 381 


them, he pointed to him, saying, ‘‘ Except ye be 
converted, and become as little children, ye shall 
not enter into the kingdom of heaven: whosoever, 
therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, 
the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” 
The tallest trees spring from the deepest roots: 
the lark rises from her lowly nest among the dewy 
grass to sing and soar the highest of the feathered 
choristers: and like these in many instances the 
humblest have attained to the highest greatness 
Of this Solomon presents one of the most illus- 
trious examples. Endowed with the wisdom that 
has made his name so famous, he presented a living 
commentary on the words—‘‘God exalteth the 
humble.” 

Happy the country where the sovereign sets an 
example of piety, and throws the weight of the 
crown into the scale of virtue and religion. Nor 
in this respect, though the day sadly belied the 
bright promises of the morning, did Solomon fail 
to set an example to kings. He preferred God’s 
bonor to his own—building the Temple first, and 
his own palace afterwards. Again, we find him, 
very secon after his accession to the kingdom, leav- 
ing Jerusalem with all its attractions, to repair to the 
house of God in Gibeon ; and stand—an impressive 
spectacle—before the majesty of heaven as a wor- 
shipper and a sinner, ona level with the meanest 
of his subjects. There, teaching the needful, but 
oft-neglected lesson, that as our mountain lakes 
‘discharge at their outlet as much water as they 
receive from their parent streams, we also should 
give as we get, Solomon presented offerings corre- 
sponding to his position and his wealth—and also, 


382 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


perhaps, to the feeling Alexander, the Czar of a:: 
the Russias, expressed on his death-bed, when, 
being at the point of death, he was heard to say, 
‘““Kings have much need of mercy.” A thousand 
animals, Solomon's gift, bled in sacrifice at Gibeon 
—a thousand victims, a burnt-offering for his sins, 
were consumed to ashes on its altar. 

There is no money some give so grudgingly, yet 
none which he who offers with a willing mind lays 
out at such interest, as what is bestowed on God’s 
cause and spent in his service. What security, 
bond, or bill like the word of God? ‘Honor the 
Lord with thy substance,” like the fifth, is a com- 
mandment with promise. ‘‘Them that honor 
me,” He has said, “I will honor;” nor, though 
the bread we cast on the waters usually takes much 
longer time to return, did four-and-twenty hours 
elapse till God redeemed that pledge to Solomon. 

The king has gone to rest. Wearied and worn 
out, probably, with the duties of a day memorable 
for the costliest sacrifice ever offered on an altar, 
he slept; and, sleeping, dreamed. God, who in 
former and also in future ages made himself known, 
now in one and now in another fashion, appeared 
to him, saying, ‘‘Ask what I shall give thee.” 
Never was there such a munificent offer; nor, we 
may say, such an answer. The reply pleased God, 
we are told; and if we take into account Solomon’s 
inexperienced youth, the temptations to which his 
rank exposed him, the kind of pleasures kings have 
commonly pursued, and the usual objects of their 
ambition, it may well astonish us. Wisdom is pre- 
ferred to riches, to long life, and to victory over 
enemies—the common ambition of kings. Honor- 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 383 


able to any man, but especially to one so young 
as Solomon; the dictate of early piety and of the 
purest patriotism ; expressing the most profound 
humility in circumstances favorable to the growth 
‘of pride ; so moderate and so modest ; breathing 
sentiments of the deepest gratitude to God, and of 
entire devotion to the public welfare ; this choice, 
more like what might be expected of hoary age, 
the maturity of wisdom and the decay of passion, 
than of impetuous and. inexperienced youth, may 
in part be attributed to Solomon’s judicious and 
godly upbringing. He had what youth cannot too 
highly value. He had a prudent, pious, and God- 
fearing father. 

Still, many have had Solomon’s advantages 
whose lives have afforded but painful illustrations 
of the proverb, ‘“‘A foolish son is a grief to his 
father, and bitterness to her that bare him.” Be- 
sides, Solomon, at the time he made this remarkable 
choice, had not received those extraordinary gifts 
with which God afterwards endowed him. It is 
plain therefore that he was no ordinary man—to be 
lost in the common crowd; but that, like Moses 
and David, and the Apostle Paul, and almost all 
whom God has called to do great things, he was 
endowed by nature, if I may say so, with great 
abilities. The choice, let it be observed, which 
reflected such honor on his understanding, was 
made not after, but before God bestowed on him 
the gifts of a marvellous, or rather miraculous 
wisdom. 

The extraordinary wisdom of Solomon appeared 
in his character— 

1. As a ruler, 


384 STUDIES OF CHAPACTER. 


There is an essential difference between learning 
and wisdom. An ounce of mother wit is better, it 
is said, than a pound of learning; and verifying 
that proverb, some of the most erudite men have 
shown themselves in the practical affairs of life, the 
management of their own or other people’s busi- 
ness, not much better than born fools. There is a 
wide gulf also between wisdom in speech and wis: 
dom in action, as is expressed in the confession, 
“I saw and approved the better, and yet did the 
worse,” put in the mouth of one by a heathen 
moralist. Of this distinction Charles II., whom 
one of our greatest historians justly calls ““a moral 
monster,” presented a remarkable example—justi- 
fying, by the madness of his folly, his shameless 
indulgence of the lowest passions, the reckless and 
ruinous course he pursued against his better judg- 
ment, this description: ‘‘He never said a foolish 
thing nor ever did a wise one.” There was a 
moment, but only a moment, when his subjects 
were ready to form no more favorable judgment 
of Solomon. 

The night with its remarkable dream is passed 
Next day the king, whose presence, according to 
Eastern customs, was open to his meanest subject, 
sits on the judgment seat. Two women of disre- 
putable character, bearing a dead and a living 
child, approach. Each, according to her own tale, 
wronged, and clamoring loud for justice, lays 
claim to the living infant, and refuses to own the 
dead. There being no evidence in the case other 
than their own unsupported assertions, the spec- 
tators are at a loss which to believe—the infamous 
life of both making the one as little worthy ot 


SOLOMON THE WISE Man. 385 


credit as the other. The dilemma is well calcu- 
lated to put their king’s sagacity to the test ; and 
they wait with eager curiosity to see how he will 
decide. But with what horror are they struck. 
' how do they stand aghast, and what unhappiness 
do they anticipate to themselves and their country 
when Solomon opens his lips to pronounce a judg- 
ment apparently as foolish as cruel! The knot he 
is unable to untie he will cut. He calls for a sword, 
ordering the living child to be divided, and a half 
given toeach. But how is the horror of the people 
turned to surprise aud joy, and how do they hurry 
from the court to publish Solomon’s fame, and pro- 
nounce him the paragon of judges, when, as one of 
the women springs forward with a scream, and 
seizing the uplifted arm of the executioner, turns 
her face to the king to cry, ‘‘O my lord, give her 
the living child, and in no wise slay it ;” he, testing 
the matter by this appeal to nature, points to the 
trembling, weeping, pallid, horror-stricken sup- 
pliant and says, ‘‘ Give her the living child, she is 
the mother thereof!” 

Thus Solomon held the scales of justice, and with 
a hand equally skilful and firm, he held the reins 
of government. On his accession to the throne, he 
did not find himself ona bed of roses; nor in cir- 
cumstances that belied the saying, ‘‘ Uneasy lies 
the head that wears a crown.” The kingdom was 
suffering from the depression and disorder which 
long years of war are apt to produce under the 
most vigorous government; and this evil was 
greatly aggravated at that time in the land of 
Israel by certain peculiar circumstances. The 
royal house was divided against itself. The rent 

25 


386 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


extended from the palace to the people, and pro- 
duced rival factions, each supporting its own candi- 
date for the throne. The army was commanded. 
by military chiefs. These having distinguished 
themselves in David’s wars, had obtained an in- 
fluence which the crown could not afford to despise, 
and yet had not the power to control. Old, less 
indeed in years than in the decay of faculties which 
battles, and a life of domestic troubles and public 
bsoils had prematurely weakened, David in the 
closing years of his life held the reins of government 
with a feeble hand. 

Such were the circumstances of the country on 
Solomon’s accession ; and nothing could be more 
admirable than the order his sagacity evoked out 
of this chaos and confusion. Without any breach 
of the laws of justice, or encroachment on the 
rights of the subject, he dexterously rid himself of 
every person dangerous to the government. What 
his head planned with wisdom, his hand executed 
with vigor ; till his government, admirably orga- 
nized in every department, resembled a vast ma- 
chine, complete in its details, beautiful in its con- 
struction, with its numerous wheels all revolving in 
silent and perfect harmony. 

2. As a man of learning and science. 

Aristotle, the Stagyrite, and tutor of Alexander 
the Great, is usually called ‘‘the Father of Natural 
History.” Without pronouncing him superior to 
either Plato or Socrates, he was certainly one of 
the greatest men any age, ancient or modern, has 
produced. Cuvier—and there is no more compe- 
tent authority—says, that ‘““he deserves as a natu- 
ralist to be taken as a model,” that, so far as the 


SOLOMON TIIE WISE MAN. 387 


animal kingdom is concerned, “ he has treated this 
branch of natural history with the greatest genius ;” 
and that “the principal divisions which naturalists 
. still follow are due to hiny’ —to a man who lived 
nearly four hundred years before the Christian era. 
This is high praise ; nor do I mean to detract from 
it. Yet, ifany comparison were to be made be- 
tween Aristotle and Solomon, it should be remem- 
bered that the Greek pursued his studies under 
peculiar advantages. Eight hundred talents of the 
royal revenue were spent on his researches ; and 
not only was he encouraged by a sovereign who 
was smitten with a desire to know the nature of 
animals, but several thousand persons, according to 
Pliny, were engaged throughout Greece and the 
whole of Asia in providing him with materials ; and 
while he had his whole time to devote without in- 
terruption or distraction to his studies, there is 
reason to believe that his great work on the animal 
kingdom is less the result of his own observation 
than a collection of all that had been observed by 
others. 

But, whatever be the merits of the Stagyrite, he 
was not the first who earned laurels in this depart- 
ment of science. Five hundred years before his 
birth, Solomon had entered and explored the same 
field: and thus he, more than Aristotle or any 
other man, may claim the honor of being regarded 
as the father of natural science. Embracing a vast 
range of subjects, “‘he spake,” says the inspired 
historian, “‘ of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in 
Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out 
of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, 
and of creeping things, and of fishes.” That brief 


388 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


and simple record, that glimpse of the vast range 
of Solomon’s studies, may well excite our wonder 
and admiration; especially when we take into 
account that this remarkable man devoted himself 
to these pursuits amid the temptations of an 
Eastern court, the cares of commerce, and the 
distractions and vast enterprises ofakingdom. His 
is a rare chapter in the history of kings. Where 
shall we find its parallel ? 

It is only a few fragments that remain to us 
either of his history or of his writings. We read in 
the Bible, “ The rest of the acts of Solomon, and all 
that he did, arid his wisdom, are they not written in 
the Book of the Acts of Solomon?” and again, 
“The rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are 
they not written in the Book of Nathan the Prophet, 
and in the prophecy of Abijah the Shilonite, and in » 
the vision of Iddo the Seer?” But where are these 
records? With the exception, perhaps, of some 
passages extracted from their pages, and engrossed 
in the books of Kings and Chronicles, they have all 
perished. Undistinguished in their fate from 
thousands of books that have neither genius nor 
any other property to keep them afloat, these, which 
the church and world would not willingly have con- 
sented to lose, have sunk in the stream of time. 
They are lost. It is vain to regret that, only we 
may venture to say that had they been extant, 
Solomon’s name would have occupied a foremost 
place in the roll of science. His discoveries and re- 
searches would have supplied abundant reasons for 
his unexampled fame, and for the pilgrimages which 
men, and women also, made from all parts of the 
worid to hear his wisdom, and see his glory. Pos- 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 389 


sessed of these writings, we should have read, not 
with more faith, but with a higher appreciation of 
its meaning, the eulogium of the inspired historian 
—‘And God gave Solomon wisdom and under- 
standing exceeding much, and largeness of heart, 
even as the sand that is on the seashore. And 
Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the 
children of the east country, and all the wisdom of 
Egypt. For he was wiser than all men; than 
Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Chalcol, and 
Darda, the sons of Mahol ; and his fame was in all 
nations round about.” 

3. As a poet and moralist. 

Two at least of the Psalms are ascribed to 
Solomon. These are the 72nd, which, beginning 
with the prayer, “‘Give the king thy judgments, O 
God !” proceeds to describe in glowing language, and 
with prophetical reference to the blessings of the 
gospel, the peace and plenty and glory of his reign ; 
and the 127th, where, with reference probably to 
the temple, to the wall and watchman that pro- 
tected Jerusalem, and to the permanence of his royal 
house, the king acknowledges his dependence on 
God. ‘Except the Lord build the house,” he says, 
“they labor in vain that build it: except the Lord 
keep the city, the watchmen waketh in vain, 
Children are the heritage of the Lord ; happy is he 
that hath his quiver full of them.” Besides these, 
we have, first, the Book of Proverbs, that unparal- 
leled repertory of practical wisdom ; secondly, the 
Book of Ecclesiastes, a treatise on the vanity of 
this world written under the solemn shadows of 
another, with the tears and trembling hand of a 
late but true repentance ; and, thirdly, his Song, 


390 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


that wonderful ode which, with its double and 
hidden meanings, the fervor of its language, and 
its highly Oriental imagery, it requires no common 
measure both of genius and piety to properly ap- 
preciate. 

Yet these are but fragments of his works. 
Whether the Songs that are lost were written under 
no truer inspiration than what is loosely attributed 
to poets, and of what-character they were—amatory, 
pious, or patriotic, we know not. But his muse was 
prolific ; his songs, the Bible tells us, being a thou- 
sand and five, and his proverbs not fewer than three 
thousand in number. Neither do we know whether 
these three thousand wise saws were over and above 
those preserved in the Book of Proverbs. It is 
more important to observe that in that book, of 
the greater part of which Solomon was undoubtedly 
the author, there is an amount of wisdom, know- 
ledge of men and manners, sound sense and prac- 
tical sagacity, such as no other work presents. It 
fulfils in a unique and pre-eminent degree, the re- 
quirements of effective oratory—not only every 
chapter, but every verse, and almost every clause 
of every verse expressing something which both 
“strikes and sticks.” 

I cannot fancy the temptations, the difficulties, 
the dangers of life, through which this book, were 
youth or age to take it as their chart and compass, 
would not guide them with safety and honor. Its 
pages, opened at random, shine with gems, rarest 
specimens of shrewd observation and practical 
wisdom. The day was in Scotland, I may observe, 
when all her children were initiated into the art of 
reading through the Book of Proverbs. It would 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 391 


be difficult, and indeed impossible, to find any book 
so suitable for such a purpose as that, with its 
simple Saxon and monosyllabic words. I have no 
_ doubt whatever, neither had the late Principal Lee, 
as appears by the evidence he gave before a com- 
mittee of parliament—that the high character which 
Scotsmen earned in bygone years was mainly due 
to their early acquaintance with the Proverbs, the 
practical sagacity and wisdom of Solomon. To 
their familiarity with these was due their caution 
prudence, economy, and foresight, their reverence 
for the persons and submission to the authority of 
parents, those properties by which, often rising from 
the humblest condition, they pursued their fortunes 
with success in every quarter of the globe. The 
book has unfortunately disappeared from our 
schools; and with its disappearance my country- 
men are more and more losing their national 
virtues—in self-denial and self-reliance, in foresight 
and economy, in reverence of parents and abhor- 
rence of public charity, some of the best character- 
istics of old manners and old times. 

Such is a sketch of Solomon’s natural and super- 
natural endowments. Insects are attracted to a 
candle ; sea-birds to the lighthouse that stands on 
lonely rock or stormy steep; and shining in the 
dawn of science, through the gloom of these early 
ages, like a light in a dark place, Solomon attracted 
to the court and country which his wisdom illumi- 
nated visitors from all the regions round about. He 
was the wonder of his day; and yet there is no 
history from the perusal of which we are more ready 
to rise, exclaiming, ‘Lord, what is man?” The 
deepest soundings in a lake commonly lie under its 


392 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


highest crags, and as the depths there corresponds 
to the elevation, so Solomon appears in some 
respects to have sunk as far below as in others he 
rose above the level of ordinary men. 

Let us look at some of the spots in this sun—the 
errors and faults of Solomon. 

In the first place, not content, as he might well 
have been, with surpassing all the kings of the earth 
in wisdom, he is smitten with the vulgar ambition 
of eclipsing them also in the amount of his revenues, 
in the luxuries, pomp, and splendor of his court. 
He became a voracious whirlpool, swallowing up 
the wealth of-the country. He oppressed his sub- 
jects with taxes ; alienating their affections from the 
House of David, and sowing the seeds of the revolt 
that burst out in the days of his son, and rent the 
kingdom asunder. Ere the close of his reign, his 
boundless extravagance and insatiable ambition 
had brought Israel to the verge of ruin. The flight 
of Jeroboam into Egypt, where, as a vulture sits 
watching the dying throes of its prey, he waited the 
death of Solomon, and those outbursts of rebellion 
by Hadad in Edom, and by Rezon in Syria, which 
occurred in his life-time, were but the trembling of 
the mountain that precedes the discharge of the 
volcano, the distant thunder that heralds the 
storm. 

In the second place, Solomon gave himself up 
to a life of sensual indulgences. Out-Heroding 
Herod — going far beyond other kings in these 
pleasures, as in wealth and wisdom, he had seven 
hundred wives (all of them princesses), and three 
hundred concubines. A most shocking example for 
a king to set! yet in justice to Solomon, it is fair te 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 393 


observe that this vast and crowded harem was pro- 
bably, to some extent, maintained for display; part 
of the state of the great in those days lying in the 
_ number of their wives, as it lies now—a less, but 
still a grievous burden—in the number of their 
servants. 

In the third place, Solomon became an idolater ; 
addicting himself, shame to say, not only to idola- 
trous, but to cruel and obscene rites. What a fall 
was there! He who built the sacred Temple, and 
offered up with devout lips the sublime prayer with 
which it was dedicated to the service of Jehovah— 
the only and true God, lived to ‘“‘go after Ashto- 
reth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom, 
the abomination of the Amorites.” As if in open 
contempt of Jehovah, he raised within sight of His 
holy temple ‘‘an high place for Chemosh, the 
abomination of Moab, and for Moloch, the abomi- 
nation of the children of Ammon, in the hill that is 
before Jerusalem.” The wife of Elimelech had gone 
forth from Bethlehem well and wealthy, with a 
husband at her side and two gallant sons at het 
back. She returns a lone, broken-down, impover- 
ished widow—bereaved of her children, stripped of 
all her wealth, sunk into the lowest poverty, with 
no friend on earth but a widowed alien, poor as 
herself; and such was the contrast between her 
present and past condition that the people, as they 
stood at their doors and saw her go up the street, 
could hardly believe their own eyes. Their pity 
swallowed up in surprise at this striking and strange 
vicissitude, they lifted up their hands to say, “Is 
this Naomi?” But there is much in the degrada- 
tion into which Solomon fell, in the scenes in which 


304 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


this wisest of men appears playing such an un- 
worthy and wicked part, to call from our lips still 
stronger expressions of grief and wonder. ‘How 
art thou fallen, son of the morning !” 

We have not room to trace all the causes of 
this strange and melancholy downfall, but may 
specify two or three that should be lessons and 
warnings to us. 

We find one in his too eager pursuit of wealth. 
The love of money went far to eat the love of God 
out of his heart. Besides, acquired as his wealth 
chiefly was through commercial intercourse with 
heathen nations, it exposed him, and his country- 
men also, to influences dangerous to their morals 
and religion. Let our own nation be warned. She 
holds a foremost place in the race of commerce. 
Our wealth is year by year increasing at an unpa- 
ralleled ratio. But let us rejoice with trembling ; 
warned in time by the fall of Solomon, and the ruin 
of his house and kingdom. There are merchants 
and manufacturers in our country who have need 
to remember that the wealth which is obtained at 
* the expense of the morals of the people costs much 
too high a price ; and it were well for all to remem- 
ber that no man is justified in exposing himself to 
circumstances or associates dangerous to his soul, 
for the sake of pay or place, of escaping poverty, 
or of earning a fortune. 

Another cause of Solomon’s fall may perhaps be 
found in his introduction of sensuous forms and a 
splendid ritual into the worship of God. A taste 
for these strongly marks our own age ; and may not 
God have set him up as a beacon of warning to the 
churches? With no bad, but probably good, inten- 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 305 


tions he turned the simple services of the ancient 
Jewish worship into a gorgeous ritual. Perhaps he 
hoped to draw people to the house of God by ser- 
. vices designed to attract the eye and gratify the 
senses. I am the more free to say so, as I see no 
evidence in the Bible that he had any authority 
whatever for many of the forms he introduced into 
the worship of God. The consequence of this policy 
was, as it always has been, that outward forms came 
to usurp the place of religion. Their observance 
was substituted for practical piety ; and religion at 
length suffered the fate of a tree that is choked to 
death by the creepers that, though perhaps bearing 
beautiful flowers, have wrapped themselves around 
it; or, to vary the figure, the fate of warriors in 
those days, when, sheathed in iron from head to 
heel, they sank on the field of battle, not so much 
under the blows of their enemies as the weight of 
their arms. 

Another, and indeed the chief, cause of Solomon’s 
fall lay in his marriages. His wives, who were 
heathen women, turned away his heart in his old 
age after other gods. So Scripture tells us; and 
not to our surprise. He may have flattered him- 
self that he would persuade them to embrace the 
faith ; and that though he failed, he himself should 
suffer no injury by tolerating their idolatry and 
granting them liberty of worship. The result was 
otherwise ; and the issues of his experiment 
warn us against tolerating vice, lending any 
countenance to error, or allowing liberty to run 
into license. 

Solomon’s case presents the strongest protest 
against unhallowed marriage: a remarkable ex- 


396 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


ample of the danger to which they expose their 
souls who, fascinated by beauty or blinded by 
affection, or under the influence of other and less 
creditable motives, become, as the case may be, 
the husbands or wives of the ungodly. For a pious 
person to marry one, however otherwise attractive, 
who is a stranger to the grace of God, and feels no 
sympathy with him in his love to Christ—who 
though not hostile is indifferent to religion, is to 
tempt the fate of'the poor moth, that, attracted by 
its glare, flutters around the candle, to plunge at 
length into the flame, and lose its wings—perhaps 
its life. Does not almost all experience prove that, 
in the case of such incongruous and unhallowed 
marriages, the good are more likely to be perverted 
than the bad converted? When, springing from 
the bank into the pool where one is perishing, the 
brave swimmer approaches the object of his pity, 
and circles round and round him to catch his hair 
or hand, what care he takes to keep clear of the 
drowning grasp!—knowing how much easier it 
would be, should he once come within his clutches, 
for the drowning to pull him down than for him to 
pull the drowning out. : 

And that such a fate is most likely to be the 
result of unhallowed marriages is proved as well 
by the earliest records of mankind as by all 
later experience. I read their condemnation in 
words which represent them as one of the chief 
sources of that monstrous pollution from which God 
washed the world by the waters of Noah’s flood. 
“The sons of God,” says the sacred record, “ came 
in unto the daughters of men, and they bare 
children unto them ; and God saw that the wicked- 


SOLOMON THE WISE MAN. 307 


ness of man was great on the earth, and that the 
imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only 
evil continually ; and it repented the Lord that he 
chad made man on the earth, and it grieved him at 
his heart ; and the Lord said, I will destroy man, 
whom I have created, from the face of the earth; 
both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and. 
the fowls of the air ; for it repenteth me that I have 
made them.” In regard to such marriages we may 
ask ‘‘ How can two walk together, except they be 
agreed? Canaman touch pitch and not be defiled ? 
or take fire into his bosom, and his clothes not be 
burned?” Not only so, but unions between the 
God-fearing and the godless, the devout and un- 
devout, are expressly condemned. God forbids the 
banns. Inequality in point of color, or age, or 
wealth, or accomplishments, or rank, Christian 
sect and denomination, is no sin. Marriage under 
such circumstances may not be wise, in certain cases, 
but isnever wicked. The one inequality from which 
God’s people should allow neither interest nor 
affection to blind their eyes, is that from which 
Solomon suffered, and God, by the mouth of Paul, 
forbids, saying, ‘* Be not unequally yoked together 
with unbelievers.” 

We cannot enter on the much and long disputed 
question whether, notwithstanding his great fall and 
sad backslidings, Solomon does not present an ex- 
ample of one saved at the uttermost—a brand 
plucked from the burning. We hope, and indeed 
think, that there is good reason to believe he does. 
Regarded in that light, let his case encourage the 
greatest sinner to return, and cast himself at Jesus’ 
feet, crying, “‘Save me, I perish!”—the greatest 


308 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


packslider to retrace his steps, and repair to the 
throne of mercy, saying, ‘“‘ Heal my backslidings, 
and love me freely!” Still, taking the most chari- 
table view of Solomon, and clinging to the hope 
that this wise and famous man, who was on earth a 
type of Christ’s person, found mercy, and is now in 
heaven—a trophy of Christ’s cross, of the love that 
welcomes the returning penitent and of the blood 
that cleanseth the chief of sinners ; his case is con- 
fessedly one surrounded with great difficulties. The 
day will reveal the truth. Till then a dark cloud 
hangs over his fate ; and, had I to seek a motto 
for his tomb, had I to engraft a lesson on his history, 
it were this: THUS SAITH THE LORD, LET NOT 
THE WISE MAN GLORY IN HIS WISDOM, NEITHER 
LET THE MIGHTY MAN GLORY IN HIS MIGHT; 
LET NOT THE RICH MAN GLORY IN GIs 
RICHES ; BUT LET HIM THAT GLORIETH, GLORY 
IN THIS, THAT HE UNDERSTANDETH AND KNOW- 
ETH ME.” 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 39¢ 


Beboboum ithe Foolish Wan. 


BREAKERS a-head !—the fearful sound, which 
is no sooner raised by the outlook, and passed 
along the deck, than the wheel flies round, and the 
ship’s head, if haply not too late, is put on the 
other tack—this was the cry Rehoboam might have 
heard when his father’s death called him to the 
helm. Like the flash of the snowy foam descried 
through the pitchy night, and the hoarse roar that 
rises above rattling cordage, creaking timbers, and 
howling wind, as the waves thunder on the reef, 
there were many things in the condition of Israel 
at the time of Rehoboam’s succession to warn and 
to alarm him. A crisis had arrived, requiring 
prompt but prudent action, consummate skill, a 
cool head, and a firm hand in him who would 
extricate the state, and save the throne. 

Turning giddy on the height to which they had 
been too suddenly raised, or intoxicated with power, 
kings have sacrificed the interests of morality and 
religion, the public welfare, the loyalty and respect 
of their subjects, to the gratification of their pas- 
sions. Acting without the fear of God, as if the 
people were made for them, and not they for the 
people, they have astonished the world by their 
madness. What an example of that the first 
Napoleon !—him whom bleeding nations, roused to 


qoo STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


resistance, dragged from a throne he might have 
left to his descendants, and cast into the lone prison 
of a sea-girt isle, to pine away the last few miserable 
years of life, like an eagle chained to a rock. Our 
own history supplies similar, almost equally remark- 
able, examples in the last representatives of the 
Stuart dynasty. Love of despotism cost the unfor- 
tunate Charles I. his head; by brutal lusts his 
eldest son undermined the foundations of the 
throne; and, by his bigotry, the youngest over- 
turned the tottering fabric. The latter—James the 
Seventh of Scotland, and the Second of England— 
though a bad man, was a bigoted Papist ; one who, 
like many of the communion he adhered to, seemed 
to think that his crimes against morality might be 
atoned for by those he committed in the interests 
of the Church. He aimed at reimposing on the 
neck of our free country the hateful yoke of Rome. 
Our fathers resisted, and God defeated his scheme ; 
yet it cost him and his family the throne of these 
three kingdoms, and gave occasion to the wit of 
one who said of James, he was fool enough to give 
three crowns for a Mass. 

There is a striking story told of a professional 
fool—one of those men, half rogues and half fools, 
to use a common expression, who once formed an 
appendage of every royal house. His sovereign 
and master, on investing him with staff and cap 
and bells—the insignia of his office—told him to 
wear them till he found a fool greater that himself. 
In course of time the king fell ill, and was at the 
point of death. On telling the witling that he was 
to leave him, the other asked where he was going. 
On a long journey, and to a far country, from which 


REHOBOAM TUE FOOLISH MAN. 401 


I shall never return, replied the dying man. And 
what provision, asked the fool, have you made for 
it? Provision! said his master, who had been a bad 
and irreligious man, with a heavy sigh, Alas, I have 
made none! Whereupon, with a gleam of sense 
shot like a sunbeam through the clouds, the fool 
quickly doffed staff and cap and bells, and laid 
them down before the king, saying, They are 
yours ; I was only to keep them till I found—-and 
I have found him—a fool greater than myself. 
Now, whether committed by prince or peasant, the 
greatest folly, no doubt, is to live forgetful of the 
‘“‘long journey,” and the need of seeking an interest 
in Jesus Christ ; but in the conduct of his govern- 
ment and management of temporal affairs, none 
that ever wore a crown had a better claim to the 
cap and bells than he who stands in this chapter as 
the type of folly. 

Rehoboam’s, perhaps, is the most remarkable 
instance the world ever saw of this, that, whatever 
may be hereditary—titles, estates, health, or disease 
—wisdom, like saving grace, is not. Some of the 
best men have had the worst sons; and in Solomon, 
we have the wisest man father of the greatest fool 
that ever verified the words, “they heap up riches, 
and know not who shall gather them,” wasted a 
fortune, or lost athrone. We have only to read his 
history, to see how fully he realized those gloomy 
forebodings which have marred the pleasure many 
expected from their accumulated gains, and amid 
which the sun of Solomon set in clouds and dark- 
ness. “I hated,” he says, ‘‘all the labor which ] 
had taken under the sun, because I should leave it 
unto the man that shall be afte: me, and whe 


402 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool ?” 
The folly of Rehoboam, which appeared in many 
things, culminates in— 

His conduct in the revolt. 

To trace that event to its origin, we must go 
further back than the misgovernment or crimes of 
his father Solomon, and ascend the stream of his- 
tory to an early period of the Jewish commonwealth. 
Like many of the evils which separate brethren in 
Christ and afflict His Church, it had its source in 
jealousy—the jealous feeling with which Ephraim 
regarded the other tribes, and especially Judah. 
Covering the largest extent of country, and mus- 
tering most men for battle, they were the most 
powerful tribe. Proud of that, they would brook 
no inferiority. We find the Ephraimites, for example, 
quarrelling with Gideon because he had presumed 
to fight with Midian without summoning them to 
his aid; nor could he pacify these haughty and 
high-handed warriors but by humbling himself and 
addressing them in such flattering terms as these— 
““ What have I now done in comparison of you? Is 
not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better 
than the vintage of Abiezer?” The same vile, cruel, 
and hateful passion broke out more fiercely still 
against Jephthah, another saviour of the land. Ani- 
mated with that sectarian spirit which denies or 
depreciates the good done by others, this same tribe 
of Ephraim said, ‘‘ Wherefore passest thou over to 
fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not 
call us to go with thee ?—we will burn thine house 
upon thee with fire.” So haughtily did they bear 
themselves, and so hotly resent what affronted their 
pride, that, blinded by passion to the monstrous 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 403 


sin of fratricide, they turned their swords against 
Jephthah and his gallant band—sacrificing to their 
jealousy the forty-two thousand men of their own 
tribe whom they left dead, as they fled defeated 
from the field of battle. To this passion may be 
attributed also their stanch adherence to the house 
ef Saul during the seven years that David reigned 
over the tribe of Judah. At length, no doubt, along 
with the other tribes, they acquiesced in what 
appeared to be the arrangements of Providence: 
crowning David at Hebron king over all the land. 
Then, as the history relates, came all the tribes of 
Israel to David unto Hebron, and spake, saying, 
“Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh: also in 
time past when Saul was king over us, thou wast 
he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel; and 
the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people 
Israel, and thou shalt be captain over all Israel.” 
Yet, though David, alive to the danger, so con- 
ducted his government as to suspend the jealousy 
of Ephraim ; and though it smouldered during the 
whole reign of Solomon, the old passion, like the 
sins of an unsanctified professor of religion, was 
there; ready to break out; needing but causes 
sufficiently active to revive and burst into flame— 
and these, as events proved, were silently at work 
during a considerable part of the reign of Solomon. 

It is a remarkable fact that Solomon violated 
every one of the injunctions which Moses laid down 
- to guide the kings of Israel when the time arrived 
that the tribes, to be neighbor-like, should choose 
aking. As if he had resolved of express intention 
to set God’s instructions at defiance, every one 
thing the king was forbidden to do he did. For 


404 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


example, speaking in the name of God and in view 
of the future, Moses said of their king to be, “‘ He 
shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the 
people to return to Egypt to the end that he should 
multiply horses ; neither shall he multiply wives to 
himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall 
he multiply to himself silver and gold.” This, in 
the form of inhibition or interdict, looks less like a 
simple warning than a direct prophecy of Solomon’s 
crimes and career. He did all these forbidden 
things ; and thereby, as well as by the idolatries he 
introduced—all gross, many of them obscene—he 
forfeited the respect, and, toa large extent, alienated 
the affections of the best of his people; those pro- 
phets and pious men by whose prayers to God and 
influence with the community the state might have 
been saved in its hour of greatest danger. Besides 
this, he made his reign so burdensome to the 
country through monopolies and taxation as to 
revive the jealousy of Ephraim, and strengthen the 
enemies of his house; and at length force a patient 
people on the first favorable occasion to remon- 
strate, and, when their remonstrances were not only 
treated with neglect but answered with insolence 
and insults,to rebel. That occasion came when the 
tribes assembled to crown his son and successor at 
Shechem. And. when Jeroboam, the enemy both 
ef father and son, called from Egypt to be the 
mouthpiece, and head, and hand of an oppressed 
and angry people, appeared on the scene, “the hour 
and the man had come.” 

This man, Jeroboam, belonged to the tribe of 
Ephraim. He had been a distinguished soldier, 
and at one time a great favorite of Solomon's. 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 405 


“He was,” says the author of the Book of Kings, 
‘a mighty man of valor ; and Solomon, seeing that 
the young man was industrious, made him ruler 
over all the charge of the house of Joseph,’—in 
other words, over the tribes of Manasseh and 
Ephraim. Little dreaming, like ourselves often on 
the eve of important events, what of good or evil a 
day or hour might bring forth, he one day left 
Jerusalem to find himself in a lonely part, and at a 
turn of the road, face to face with a prophet, Ahijah 
the Shilonite. The man of war makes obeisance to 
the man of God, who proceeds straightway to lay 
rough hands on him, and pluck the cloak from his 
shoulders. Taken by surprise, or overawed by the 
other’s presence and sacred character, Jeroboam 
neither resists nor remonstrates ; but stands by to 
see the prophet rend his garment into twelve pieces. 
But how much greater his astonishment when he 
who had ventured on this bold rude liberty counts 
off ten of them, and presents them to him, saying, 
“Take thee ten pieces ; for thus saith the Lord, the 
God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out 
of the hand of Solomon” (or rather, as is afterwards 
stated, out of his son’s hand), ‘“‘and will give ten 
tribestothee.” Asecret this illto keep. Jeroboam 
may have said it in confidence to his wife, and she, 
probably, in turn to her gossips; but however it 
happened, whether from incautiousness or intention 
on his part, or whether by some dark hint which 
Ahijah dropped, enough oozed out to alarm Solo- 
mon, and render it necessary for Jeroboam, if he 
would save his life, to fly for refuge to the land of 
Egypt. There, verifying the words, “He that 
believeth shall not make haste,” and teaching 


406 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


statesmen, churchmen, and better men than he, in 
all circumstances to wait on, rather than antici- 
pate, Providence, he bides his time. It comes 
in a call from the people of Israel; prepared to 
revolt if reform and redress are refused. Solo- 
mon is dead; the time is favorable for the attempt ; 
and so they send to Egypt for Jeroboam, either 
because they had some, though it might be an 
imperfect, knowledge of the story of the torn 
garment and the ten pieces, or because, attracted 
by his reputation for statesmanship and military 
talents, they regarded him as the most likely man 
to obtain them redress, or if that was refused, to 
head the revolt, and conduct it to a successful 
issue. They judged rightly that a man of superior 
rank or talents at the head of the masses is as 
necessary to the success of a revolution as the 
glittering steel-head fixed on its wooden shaft to 
the worth of a battle-spear. 

All things thus arranged, the mine dug beneath 
the throne, and the train laid ready for firing, they 
repair to Shechem to the coronation of Rehoboam. 
Its ceremonies are brought toaclose. Surrounded 
by a splendid retinue, the king, probably flattering 
himself that he has won the favor of Ephraim by 
selecting its chief city for the place of his corona- 
tion, sits on his throne, high and lifted up. The 
sacred oil has been poured, and the crown, flashing 
back the sunbeams from the gems on its golden 
arches, has been placed on his head; and now, 
when the white-robed priests from the temple have 
chanted the last psalm, is the time for ten times ten 
thousand knees to bend, and ten times ten thousand 
voices to rend the air with jubilant shouts of ‘‘ God 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 407 


save the King!” But no cheers rise from the mul- 
titude, echoing back, and drowning in a full ocean- 
like swell the plaudits of obsequious courtiers. An 
ominous gloom hangs on all faces. An ominous 
silence weighs on the assembly. Observing how, 
though his young councillors assume airs of insolent 
contempt, the gray-haired men who stood by his 
father Solomon regard the scene with grave and 
anxious looks, Rehoboam himself turns pale, 
blenching at these ominous signs. And not with- 
out reason ; for, the crowd dividing to let him pass, 
Jeroboam comes to the front. Now, as the people 
catch sight of their champion, the air is rent with 
cheers ; and when these cease, with the bearing of 
a man who has looked on more formidable sights 
than a king, and hears the tramp of millions at his 
back, he addresses Rehoboam, saying, ‘‘ Thy father 
made our yoke heavy ; now, therefore, make thou 
the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy 
yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will 
serve thee.” To any ears but those of a fool, these 
words, so plain, so brief, and unlike the flattering 
adulatory terms familiar to Rehoboam, had a ring 
which showed that the speaker was a man not to 
be trifled with. 

It is idle for us to inquire whether the people 
were justified in assuming the attitude they did 
assume, whether the statement of their spokesmar, 
Jeroboam, was, or was not, borne out by facts. A 
great political crisis had arrived. The peril was 
imminent. The nation was on the verge of rebel- 
lion ; nor could a rebellion be averted but by the 
most skilful and, indeed, delicate management. 
The king stood above a magazine of combustibles, 


408 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


An angry word or look, and the spark falls which 
fires them, and shakes his kingdom to its founda~ 
tions—shatters it in pieces; the ship hangs on a 
mountain wave, close by the thundering reef—a 
wrong turn of the helm, and she goes crashing on 
the rocks, to be scattered in fragments on the deep. 
A difficult post Rehoboam’s; and to no man was 
the saying ever less appropriate than to him, the 
right man in the right place. 

At the suggestion, probably, of some sage and 
aged councillor who, prompt to see and anxious 
to avert the danger, whispers it in his ear, his 
first step is marked by wisdom. He will reply 
in three days—a proposal which the people regard 
as reasonable, and, averse to precipitate matters or 
to rush into rebellion, at once agree to. A council 
is summoned. It meets. The old men advise 
concession—that the king should speak the people 
fair; yield to their present humor; bend to 
the wave which would in that case, foaming and 
formidable as it looked, pass harmless over him. 
They assure him that a little sacrifice of his pride 
and dignity now would bind the nation hereafter, 
and forever, to his service. There was sound 
sense in this. How inconstant the popular 
humor, and how easily a_ skilful hand may 
manage, calm, and turn even a fierce and furious 
multitude, is well known, and was signally illus 
trated by an incident in the life of the first Napo- 
Jeon. When but a distinguished officer of the 
French army, he was ordered to meet a mob in the 
streets of Paris, and disperse them. At that time 
the slimness of his form corresponded to the small- 
ness of his stature. As he advanced with troops 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 409 


and two or three cannon on the scene, the roar of 
the suffering and ferocious multitude announced 
their approach ; and at a turn of the narrow street 
-they came pouring down like an avalanche, that, 
uprooting trees and sweeping houses from their 
foundations, descends thundering into the valley. 
Ordering his guns to the front, he halted ; and, 
struck by his formidable front and determined 
attitude, so did they. Averse to shed the blood of 
citizens, he began to parley with them. Whereupon 
a woman of-fierce visage and enormous size stepped 
out—upbraiding him and his fellow soldiers as 
living on the fat of the land, while she and her 
industrious compatriots were at the point of starv- 
ing. With the promptitude that seizes the mo- 
ment; and won him afterwards many a hard-fought 
field, he stepped out too; and placing his spare, 
tiny form beside that mountain of flesh, he ad- 
dressed her companions, saying, ‘“‘I appeal to you, 
my friends, whether this good lady or I look most 
like starving?” The effect was electric. The 
humor -n4 ta>; >» the reply carried the mob as 
by a ceup 4 mas, peals of laughter succeeded to 
rage ; and, both powder and blood cleverly saved 
by a stroke of humor, the people dispersed to 
their homes in peace. There Napoleon was the 
right man in the right place: not here the son of 
Solomon. The first poured oil on the stormy 
waters ; the second, oil on a burning fire. 
Illustrating the adage, ‘‘Whom God wishes to 
destroy he first makes mad,” Rehoboam rejected 
_ the counsel of the wise old men who had stood by 
the throne, and sharpened their own wits on the 
wisdom of his father Solomon <A man at this 


410 STUDIES OF CHARACTER, 


time of forty years, he might have known that, to 
use a common proverb, a gray head is not found 
on young shoulders ; yet, in this crisis of his affairs, 
he turns his back on aged councillors to follow the 
advice of rash and inexperienced youths—of his 
own gay companions, the ministers of his guilty 
pleasures, and flatterers of his person. It was very 
foolish to seek their advice, but it was the height 
of folly, sheer madness, to take it, and at their 
suggestior lash the people into rebellion with 
words like these, ‘“My father made your yoke 
heavy, and I will add to your yoke; my father 
chastened you with whips, but I will chasten you 
with scorpions.” Adding insult to injury, to injus- 
tice haughty and intolerable insolence, this was 
not to drop a spark, but cast a blazing torch into 
a magazine of combustibles. With the suddenness 
and violence of an explosion, the pent-up indigna- 
tion of years bursts forth into open revolt. Struck 
with terror at his own work, Rehoboam leaps from 
his throne ; and as he flies the tumult, hears the 
knell of his kingdom ringing in the cry, ‘To your 
tents, O Israel! what portion have we in David? 
neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse.” 
It seems hardly possible for Rehoboam to do 
anything more unwise than this. Yet his next act 
is one where he surpasses himself—like the capital 
on a pillar, it crowns his folly. Though it might 
be shutting the door when the steed is stolen, or 
the desperate action of one who grasps, as he 
drowns, at a passing straw, he will make an effort 
to recall the people to their obedience; he will 
send a man to reason with rebellion, and talk them 
out of their mutinous spirit Nor was he without 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 4it 


such as might have ruled the fierce democracy—: 
men adhering to his cause, as brave sailors to a 
wreck, distinguished for their piety, or the advo- 
cates of popular rights, or warriors of renown, 
whom the people regarded with reverence and 
would have heard with respect. But like a man 
demented, without a glimmering of common sense, 
he pitches on one, of all his court, the most unsuit- 
able for his purpose. A messenger from the king! 
—this cry lays a momentary arrest on the revolt ; 
and when the expectation of the people is excited, 
who steps out to address them but Adoram—the 
officer that had exacted the taxes which drove 
them on rebellion. At the sight of this obnoxious 
tool of despotism, the object of their bitterest 
hatred, their rage knew no bounds. They rose; 
they fell on the unhappy man; they stoned the 
life out of him. Rehoboam has but made bad 
worse. Panic-struck at the news, he throws him- 
self into his chariot to fly to Jerusalem, a sadder 
but not a wiser man; to prove by his future career 
that it is not the fear of man, but of God, which is 
the beginning of wisdom, and that, as his own 
father said, ‘‘though thou shouldest bray a fool in 
a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not 
his foolishness depart from him.” 

Though in not marrying heathen wives, as Solo- 
mon did, and in providing separate establishments 
fot his sons, thereby averting domestic broils, Reho- 
boam, as the Bible says, ‘‘ did wisely,” yet were it 
needful still further to justify the opprobrious epi- 
thet we have attached to his name, we should find 
ample materials in his conduct on other occasions 
than the revolt. He might have seen, indeed he 


412 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


must have known, for instance, that the dismem- — 
berment of the kingdom was a judgment brought 
on his father’s house for his father’s sins. Yet, 
regardless of this, and reckless of consequences, 
moved neither by the injuries which Solomon 
produced nor by the repentance he expressed for 
his crimes, Rehoboam repeated them. “He de 
sired,” it is said, “‘ many wives ;” and had no fewer 
than eighteen, besides sixty concubines. In point 
of numbers, these, no doubt, fell far short of his 
father’s. Yet, like the negative virtues which 
Pharisees boast of, like the superiority some claim 
over such as have gone greater lengths than 
themselves in vice, this was probably due more to 
the want of way than the want of will, to the 
restraints of circumstances rather than the re- 
straints of conscience. But however that may be, 
he set an example of immorality before the nation 
which, like the water that falling on mountain tops 
descends through fissures into the valleys, was 
sure to find its way through the different grades 
down to the lowest strata of society—carrying 
corruption of morals and manners along with it. 
And when we imagine the effect of such an 
example on Judah in the days of Rehoboam, 
or contemplate the corruption of morals that, 
issuing from the court of Charles II., poured 
its foul and fetid streams over our own land, we 
cannot be too thankful that we have a Sovereign 
who frowns on every form of vice, and presents to 
her nobles and to all classes in the country an 
illustrious example of every personal, domestic, 
and public virtue. I doubt if we are sufficiently 
thankful for this great mercy. 


eee ee a 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 413 


Again : Rehoboam followed his father’s example 
in committing a yet graver crime. When Jero- 
boam, his rival, set up the calves at Dan and 
Bethel, a party in Israel taught future ages, the 
ministers and members of churches in our own, 
what part they should act when earthly interests 
and religious principles conflict. Not the priests 
only, but the pious people of the land had to 
choose between abandoning their faith or their for- 
tunes; between deserting their God or deserting 
their homes. Some, as will always happen in such 
circumstances, may have proved renegades, and 
broken down in the day of trial; but vast multi- 
tudes from her mountains, plains, and shores, 
poured out of Israel to settle, far from their sweet 
homes and paternal fields, in the land of Judah. 
This influx of piety, like that of the Huguenots on 
our own land, or of the suffering Protestants who 
fled from the Low Countries to escape the bloody 
cruelties of Philip and the Duke of Alva, brought 
a blessing with it to Judah; and under this holy in- 
fluence and God's chastening hand, the conduct of 
Rehoboam and the fortunes of his kingdom under- 
went, though but a temporary, a manifest improve- 
ment. After relating how ‘‘the priests and Levites 
that were in all Israel resorted to Rehoboam out of 
all their coasts ;” and how ‘‘the Levites left their 
suburbs and their possessions, and came to Judah 
and Jerusalem;” and how, following them—the 
natural leaders of the people in matters belonging 
to religion—“ out of all the tribes of Israel such as 
set their hearts to seek the Lord God of Israel 
came te Jerusalem;” the sacred historian tell ug, 
““so they strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and 


414 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


made Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, strong.” 
But, alas, with no permanent result. In _ his 
prosperity, Rehoboam, like many others, forgot 
the lessons of adversity. Jeshurun waxed fat and 
kicked. The dog returned to his vomit—the sow 
that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. 

Rehoboam had been a witness of the calamities 
idolatry had brought on his father and his father’s 
house, and he had had experience also of the bless- 
ings which attend the steps and swell the train of 
piety. Properly affected by the circumstances, 
he promised for a time to be another and a better 
man; but as a strong and impetuous river, though 
diverted for a while into a new, returns to its old 
channel, so he relapsed into idolatry. Nor did he 
sin alone. As it happens with crew and boats and 
cargo and floating wreck, when some mighty ship 
sinks in the deep, this man, whom no adversity 
could improve, nor experience warn, nor lessons 
the most painful educate, dragged down the nation 
with himself. ‘‘ Judah,” it is said, “‘did evil in the 
sight of the Lord, and they provoked him to jea- 
lousy with their sins, which they committed above 
all that their fathers had done; building them high 
places and images and groves on every high hill 
and under every green tree,” and amid a shocking 
corruption of public and private morals, “doing 
according to all the abominations of the nations 
which the Lord cast out before the children of 
Israel.” 

No reformation of manners can be relied on 
which does not spring from a change of heart. It 
was with Rehoboam and his country according to 
the parable, ‘‘ When the unclean spirit is gone out 


REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 418 


of a man, he saith, I will return unto my house 
from whence I came out; and when he is come he 
findeth it empty, swept, and garnished: then goeth 
he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits 
‘more wicked than himself, and they enter in, and 
dwell there : and the last state of that man is worse 
than the first.” This case of Rehoboam is by no 
meazis singular; to be regarded as exceptional or 
abnormal. In many others who for a while seemed 
reformed, the last state has proved worse than the 
first. They have left the austerities of Lent to 
plunge into the excesses of a carnival. Such cases 
are not without their lessons; they teach us to 
make sure of a true interest in Jesus Christ—to 
seck a new heart. Without that no change of 
manners contains the elements of permanence ; and 
thus they who maintain the most decent exterior 
have as much need as the vilest sinner to remem- 
ber these solemn words, “ Verily, verily,” saith our 
Lord, “except a man be born again, he cannot see 
the kingdom of God!” 

As to the causes which will account for Reho- 
boam’s career of sin and folly, many may be 
adduced. It was his misfortune, as it has been that 
of others, to be the son of one whose public engage- 
ments left him little time to bestow on the home- 
education of his family. It was also his fate, and I 
may add the same misfortune to him that it has 
been to others, to be born to wealth and power, 
and never to know, in obscurity, in hardships, in 
early struggles, and in straitened circumstances, 
what it was to bear the yoke in his youth. A 
greater misfortune still, Rehoboam did not find in 
the court of his father a school, nor in his example 


416 STUDIES OF CHARACTER 


a pattern of morals. Through his positfon and his 
prospects as heir apparent to the throne, he was 
exposed, in the society of parasites, flatterers, and 
gay companions, to a thousand dangerous and 
seductive influences. Let his fate warn us against 
his sins, and teach us to seek the grace which, a 
greater marvel than his safety in the lions’ den, 
preserved Daniel and his companions pure amid 
the impurities of the court of Babylon. But who 
that knows their own innate depravity, that folly 
is bound up in the heart even of a child, how prone 
the best are to fall, and how the best have fallen, 
will, in judging this unhappy man, mingle asperity 
with censure? In judging others it were well to 
imitate the candor, and lenity, and charity of 
Luther, who hearing an obscure person condemn 
some fault committed by the Elector in terms of 
the harshest severity, rebuked him, saying, Hold 
your tongue ; and remember that for one devil you 
have to fight with, the Elector has to fight with 
ten. 

There is one short sentence in Rehoboam’s his- 
tory which supplies the key, more perhaps than 
anything else, to his sin and folly—‘his mother’s 
name was Naamah, an Ammonitess.” She was by 
blood an alien, and by religion a heathen. Un- 
bappy in many things, but unhappiest most in such 
2 mother, he begins to be regarded more with pity 
than astonishment. The letters written on water 
are hardly formed when they are filled up: on the 
other hand, the finger that traces them on stone 
leaves no visible impression on its indurated sur- 
face; but plastic clay, midway between what is 
hard and soft, offers to the gentlest finger a sub- 


REHOGOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 417 


stance which both receives and retains an impres- 
sion. Suchis the heart that youth and childhood 
offer to a mother’s infiuences. Hence her power 
to mould, for good or evil, the character of her 
children ; and hence the gratitude they owe to God 
who have had a mother that taught their little feet 
te walk in the ways of his commandments, and en- 
couraged their feeble efforts to rise to heaven on 
the wings of prayer—at the piety of whose bosom 
their own was kindled. ‘‘I had a bad mother,” 
explains many a wreck. “I had a good mother,” 
is the way many account, under God, for their suc- 
cess in this life, and their salvation in the next. 
Let mothers therefore feel and tremble, and pray 
under a sense of their power and responsibility 
How much depends on them—like the mothers 
of old—on their bringing their little ones to Jesus 
for his hands and blessing! Hear how Cowper 
sings of the boy by a mother’s knee :— 


‘* His heart, now passive, yieldsto thy command. 
Secure it thine, its key is in thine hand. 
If thou desert thy charge, and throw it wide, 
Nor heed what guest there enter and abide, 
Complain not if attachments lewd and base 
Supplant thee in it, and usurp thy place. 
But if thou guard its secret chambers sure 
From vicious inmates, and delights impure, 
Hither his gratitude shall hold him fast, 
And keep him warm and filial to the last ; 
Or, if he prove unkind (as who can say 
But, being man, and therefore frail, he may ?) 
One comfort yet shall cheer thine aged heart, 
Howe’er he slight thee, thou hast done thy part. 


27 


ais STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Sehu the Sewlot, 


THE curtain rises toshow us the city of 
Ramouth Gilead, embosomed among mountains 
in the background; and on the stage a banquet, 
or probably a couticil of war, where Jehu sits 
surrounded by the most distinguished officers of 
the army of Israel. Suddenly, interrupting their 
potations or cogitations, one enters the chamber, 
whose shaggy raiment, appearance, and bold bear 
ing bespeak him a prophet, or one belonging to the 
order. He comes from Elisha ; and the Jews have 
a tradition that it was Jonah who, according to 
them, succeeded Gehazi in that prophet’s service. 
Whether it was so or not, this messenger of 
Heaven goes straight up, without ceremony or 
formal introduction, to Jehu, saying, I have an 
errand unto thee, O captain! And he, out of 
respect for his holy office, a gallant soldier as yet 
who had shed no blood but in fair battle, and 
dreaded no evil, rises at once to grant what the 
other requested—a private interview, furnishing no 
illustration of the saying— 

«Conscience makes cowards of us all.” 


They retire into an inner chamber. When they 
are alone, and he has seen that the door 1s shut, 
the stranger, stooping down, draws from under 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 419 


neath his shaggy garment, where he had concealed 
it, a horn of oil; and raising himself to his full 
stature, empties it on Jehu’s head, saying, “Thus 
saith the Lord God of Israel, I have anointed thee 
king over the people of the Lord, even over Israel : 
and thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy 
master, that I may avenge the blood of my servants 
the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of 
the Lord at the hand of Jezebel: for the whole 
house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from 
Ahab every male, and him that is shut up and left 
in Israel: and I will make the house of Ahab like 
the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like 
the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah; and the 
dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, 
and there shall be none to bury her.” 

Having delivered himself of a message that might 
well strike any man speechless with astonishment, 
ere the captain of the host has recovered sufficiently 
to detain or question him, he vanishes; like a con- 
spirator against Jehu’s life, who had sought a 
private interview to assassinate him as Ehud did 
the king of Moab; or like one who has lighted the 
match that carries fire to the mine and ends in a 
terrific explosion, he opens the door and flies— 
agreeably to his master’s instructions, disappearing 
as suddenly as he came. And the incident I have 
related was indeed followed by an explosion that 
shook the whole land; hurled the king from his 
throne; and buried him, his bloody mother, her 
idolatrous priests, and every member of the royal 
family in a common grave, under the ruins of the 
house of Ahab. 

With the bow bent to the breaking, their loyal 


420 _ STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


and long-enduring patience exhausted, the people 
of Israel had probably got tired out with the 
cruelties and idolatries of the reigning family. It 
was now as with a ripe pear that drops to the 
touch: as with a mighty stone hanging on the 
brow of a hill, but so undermined by winter frosts 
and summer rains, that it needs but the push of a 
bold strong hand, and it leaves its bed to be 
shattered as it bounds from crag to crag, or be 
buried out of sight in the dark depths of the lake 
below. Aware of this, Jehu saw the sceptre within 
his reach; and how, stretching out his hand to 
seize it, not only with the sanction but at the call 
of heaven, his most ambitious dreams might be 
realized. With such bloody work, yet brilliant 
prospects before him, his dreams—what in his 
more sober moments he had dismissed as dan- 
gerous, wild, and airy phantoms—about to be 
fulfilled, no wonder his countenance, as he followed 
the flying messenger to the door, bore marks of 
strong mental agitation. His fellows, who saw 
that he had received some strange and stirring 
news, ask, Is all well? With cunning equal to his 
courage, the astute soldier at first evades the 
question; assumes a modest air, as if of all that 
company he was the least ambitious. Pressed on 
all sides, even bluntly told that he was lying, he 
at length, but to appearance reluctantly, and only 
in concession to their importunity, comes out with - 
it; and having won their good graces, makes 
confidants of his fellow-soldiers. 

Now, as has happened in many other cases, the 
fable of Actzon is realized. Changed by the 
offended goddess into the form of a stag, the 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. a2i 


hunter was pursued and devoured by his own 
hounds—and now the throne of the house of Ahab 
is assailed and overturned by those who were 
sworn to support it—the army which his son, 
Joram, maintained to defend his crown and oppress 
his subjects, transfers its allegiance, with the 
facility of mercenaries, from him to Jehu. No 
sooner do the captains of the host see the sheen of 
the sacred oil on Jehu’s locks, and get from his lips 
the story of the interview, than extemporizing a 
throne, and casting their garments—eastern symbol 
of homage—at his feet, rougher heralds than 
usually proclaim the successor to the throne, they 
fill the air with the blare of trumpets, and cry, Jehu 
is king! So sudden and sweeping, I may remark, 
are the revolutions to which military governments 
are exposed; especially when profanity rather 
than prayer reigns in the camp, and the army, 
made up of the scum of the nation, is officered by 
ungodly and immoral men. A striking contrast to 
Cromwell's, which was not less distinguished for its 
piety than for its fidelity to its leader, and the 
brilliant victories its arms achieved, such was 
Joram’s army. Their impiety and profanity break 
oit in the contempt with which they spoke of a 
servant of the living God. Wherefore, said they to 
Jehu, came this mad fellow to thee >—an ungodly, 
scoffing crew, they had no more respectful term for 
the holy man. Yet why should we wonder to find 
God’s servants reckoned and denounced as mad by 
a world to which his own wisdom is fool‘shness ? 
Before glancing at the part—so blcody, con- 
spicuous, and successful—which Jehu played in the 
_ successive ‘tragedies of this revolution, . may here 


422 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


take occasion to observe that the true pillars of a 
state and throne stand in the freedom, the piety, 
and the affections of the people. Nations must be 
ruled somehow, either by love or fear, by the Bible 
or the bayonet; and ruled mainly by the former, 
under the influence to a large extent of moral and 
religious principles, what a contrast, in respect 
both of the security of the throne and the stability 
of its government, does our country present to that 
of France—gifted, as its people are, with uncommon 
genius, and inspired with the most ardent love of 
liberty? It is nigh two hundred years since this 
happy island exchanged one dynasty for another, 
and passed—rare circumstance—through a peaceful 
and bloodless revolution. How many in the course 
of a single lifetime has France seen! She seems, 
indeed, to keep up like a boy’s spinning-top by 
virtue of incessant revolutions; and destitute to a 
frightful extent as her people are of good morals 
and religion, how many more is she destined tc 
suffer? We ourselves have lived to see her in the 
throes of five or six different political convulsions. 
The streets of her gay and lovely capital flashing 
with musketry, and running red with her citizens’ 
blood, might have reminded the world of God’s 
righteous judgment ; and how, as has been been well 
said, France lost so much good blood through the 
massacre of the Huguenots, that she has staggered 
and reeled ever since. 

In the conduct of the revolution which God had 
committed to his hands, Jehu displayed as much 
wisdom as energy. His conduct was like his 
driving—“ he drove furiously ;” but the times 
demanded it. Dangerous in all cases when the 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 423 


crisis has come, hesitation or delay had been fatal 
in his. Having—by appearing to consult them— 
won the favor of his companions in arms, enlisted 
them in his cause, and so turned into partisans 
those who might otherwise have been rivals, his 
first step is to catch the birdin the nest. He must 
seize the king, where he lay in Jezreel. Should 
tidings of this revolution reach him, Joram takes 
the alarm and escapes ; so, with a promptitude that 
deserved and was likely to secure success, Jehu 
hurries trusty men to the gates with this order: 
“Let none go forth nor escape out of the city to 
go to tell it in Israel.” He will be his own 
messenger. The snake rattles before it strikes ; 
but the lightning strikes before it thunders—whom 
it kills never hears the peal. And it was with the 
suddenness and surprise of a thunderbolt Jehu 
sought to launch himself on the head of Joram. So 
the cry is, To horse, to horse! all is haste and 
bustle ; men are arming; women are weeping ; 
hasty farewells are said; and the gate thrown open 
at his approach, out drives Jehu with his chosen 
mer: to lash his foaming horses along the road that 
lay, a day’s march, between Jezreel and Ramoth 
Gilead. No stay; no delay ; to the surprise and 
terror of the peasant ploughing his father’s fields, 
on sweeps that cloud of dust, where chariots and 
horsemen and battle brands are dimly and briefly 
seen. The Jordan at lengthisreached. A moment 
to slake the thirst of their panting steeds, and at 
the word in they plunge, to stem the flood, and 
from the other shore push on with new vigor to 
surprise and seize their prey. The cavalcade is at 
length descried from the watch-tower of Jezreel. 


424 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


One, and another, and another messenger from 
Joram hastens to meet and question Jehu; and to 
the question, Is it peace? get no other but this 
rough and ominous reply, ‘‘ What hast thou to do 
with peace? Get thee behind me’—fall to the 
rear, if you value your life ! 

Astonished, and their curiosity, if not their fears 
awakened, Joram and his ally, Ahaziah, king of 
Judah, throw themselves into their chariots to meet 
Jehu. He has been recognized by the keen eyes 
of the sentinel—‘‘the driving,” he tells. the king, 
“is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for 
he driveth furiously.” They meet—place ominous 
of evil to Ahab’s race—in the portion of Naboth 
the Jezreelite ; him whose blood has been crying 
out for vengeance, How long, O Lord, how long ! 
Now the prayer is to be answered ; “the hour and 
the man are come.” 

Beyond replying, What peace, so long as the 
whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel and her witch- 
crafts are so many? Jehu wastes no time, nor 
words, upon the king. The answer has hardly left 
his lips when an arrow leaves his bow; and swiftly 
cleaving the air, directed by a surer hand than his, 
quivers in Joram’s heart. He dies. The mother 
speedily follows, treading on the heels of her son. 
Ere another hour has come, this proud, painted, 
false, treacherous, cruel, implacable, bloody woman, 
flung from a window by her slaves in answer to 
Jehu’s appeal, Who is on my side? who? is turned 
into dog’s meat—the dogs are crunching her bones 
on the streets of fezreel. A princess, a king’s 
daughter, a king’s wife, a king’s mother, what 
a fall was there! So let the persecutors of 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 425 


the righteous, and the iniquity of high places 
perish ! 
Jehu has still more bloody work to do; and in 


_ doing it—as when the lash is in hand and his 


chariot goes bounding on—“ he driveth furiously.” 
His eye does not pity, nor his hand spare, till he 
has emptied the last drop of the vial of heaven's 
vengeance on the house and seed of Ahab. Seventy 
sons of that weak and wicked king are living in 
Samaria ; ready to fill the vacant throne, and, if 
they are wanted, supply kings to all the neighbor- 
ing nations. These cubs, as well as the bear, must 
be slain ; these saplings, as well as the old tree, cut 
down ; nor drop of Ahab’s blood be left ina living 
vein. With one stroke of his pen Jehu strikes off 
their heads. A letter, couched in bitter irony, and 
borne with speed to Samaria, challenges its rulers, 
adherents of the house of Ahab, to set up the best 
and bravest of the seventy, that he and Jehu may 
have a fair fight for the crown. The proposal fills 
these cowards with dismay. ‘‘ Two kings stood not 
before him,” they said, ‘“‘how then shall we stand ?” 
Honor, oaths, fidelity, are given to the wind. 
False to their God, these men, as may be expected 
of all false to him, betray their trust. False to 
their masters, they barter their lives to save their 
own; and seventy ghastly heads are found one 
morning piled up by the gate of Jezreel. 

Not yet appeased, Naboth’s blood, and that ot - 
the righteous whom Jezebel had slain, still cries 
on heaven for vengeance. Another quarry has to 
be struck down. Two-and-forty brethren of 
Amaziah, king of Judah, whose blood was tainted 
with that of Ahab, are, unsuspecting of evil, on 


426 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


their way to pay a visit to their cousins — those 
whose heads are bleaching in the sun by the gate 
of Jezreel. The cousins meet, but not in this world. 
An opportune visit for Jehu: at one fell sweep he 
encloses the whole brood in his net ; and while the 
famous character who is now to enter on the stage 
never wanted a man to stand before the Lord, and 
survived in his family to see thrones emptied, 
dynasties and kingdoms perish, Ahab has fulfilled 
his doom. His house is left*unto him desolate ; cut 
down root and branch. His sin—as, sooner or later, 
unless forgiven, all our sins shall do—has found him 
out; and in extinguishing his family a righteous 
God pays him back in the very coin by which, in 
destroying Naboth and all his children, he obtained 
unjust possession of the vineyard at Jezreel. 

One great and yet bloodier work still waits Jehu’s 
avenging arm. The priests and worshippers of 
Baal must be destroyed. For that purpose, and 
for such a sacrifice as was never offered in the 
idol’s temple, he has a stroke of policy—a coup 
@ etat—arranged, which only a man with cunning 
as profound as his daring was bold, would have 
conceived or ventured on. His is one of the 
greatest, boldest, bloodiest plots in history; and he 
is on his way to carry it into execution, and so 
finish the work God had given him to do, when 
he meets Jonadab, the son of Rechab. Astute 
enough to see that though he held a divine com- 
mission he must neglect the use of no means, and 
that none was more likely to promote his object 
than the countenance of Jonadab—a man distin- 
guished alike for his patriotism and his piety, for 
the severity of his manners and the universal 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 427 


esteem of the people—Jehu invites him to a seat in 
his chariot ; greeting this eminent Israelite, and 
original founder of all total abstinence societies, 
. with these brave, pious words, Come, see my zeal 
for the Lord! 

I would take occasion from this case to remark,— 

1. That there is a zeal of selfishness which, 
though it may appear to be, is not zeal for the 
Lord. 

Is thine heart right? was the question with 
which Jehu accosted Jonadab; and if the question 
be understood in its highest and holiest sense, his 
subsequent history proves that he had most need 
to put it to himself. The contrast between the 
spirit of that question and the character of his 
future life is such as to painfully remind us of 
these words, Thou that preachest a man should 
not steal, dost thou steal ? thou that sayest a man 
should not commit adultery, dost thou commit 
adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou 
commit sacrilege ? 

God frequently uses the wicked as his tools— 
when the rod has served its purpose breaking it, 
and casting it into the fire. His own people also 
have been called and constrained, I may say 
against their natural feelings, to be so. Instru- 
ments of his righteous vengeance, they have had 
to shed the blood of others when they would 
rather have shed their own; to afflict humanity 
when they would rather have poured wine and 
oil into its bleeding wounds; to appear men of 
strife when they were sighing for peace, and, 
wearied of turmoil, controversy, and conflict, were 
saying, as they turned their eyes on the calm 


428 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


heavens above, Oh that I had the wings of a dove, 
that I might fly away and be at rest! But there is 
no evidence whatever of such a mind or temper 
in Jehu. There is no relenting; no recoil from 
his stern mission ; no expression of pity. Appa- 
rently congenial to his nature, he found in his 
mission the means of gratifying his passions, and 
that personal ambition which, rather than zeal for 
the Lord, was, I fear, his animating, ruling principle. 
We would not deal unjustly, nor even very severely 
by him; but when he had reached the summit of 
his ambition, and, leaving a bloody footprint on 
every step, had climbed to the throne, where was 
the zeal he boasted of—his zeal for the Lord? It 
looks as if he had all along been consciously - 
playing a part; and, finding no further use of it, 
had now dropped the mask. We are told that “he 
took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God 
of Israel with all his heart, but departed not from 
the sins of Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin.” 

It may be that Jehu deceived himself. We are 
unwilling to regard him as a hypocrite: and it is 
certain that men—with a heart which the word of 
God pronounces to be deceitful above all things 
as well as desperately wicked—have sometimes 
deceived themselves, more than the most famous 
jugglers or impostors have deceived others. And 
what made it easier for Jehu to do so was this, that 
the reformation of the land and its religious 
interests did not conflict with, but rather ran in the 
same direction as his own passions and ambition. 
The public interests and his own personal objects 
were in dangerous accord. 

Such a position is a dangerous one for any man 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 429 


to be placed in. There is no doubt to what the 
ship owes her progress when her course is up the 
stream, or the waters of an opposing tide are 
foaming on her bows; her moving power is evi- 
dently a heavenly one—the wind that sings in her 
cordage, and fills her swelling sails. But the case 
may be otherwise. The tide, the current on whose 
bosom our barque is floating, may run in the very 
direction we wish to pursue ; and as in such a case 
we may be deceived as to the power that moves us, 
so it is easy for us to persuade ourselves that we 
are moved by zeal for the Lord when, I may say, 
we are not blown on by heavenly but only borne 
on by earthly influences—such as regard for our 
character ; such as the approbation of men; such 
as the pride of consistency ; such as the gratifica- 
tion, perhaps, of what are more or less common to 
all, humane and charitable feelings. 

Let a man examine himself, says an Apostle: 
and nothing stands more in need of being sifted, 
analyzed, and tested than our zeal for the Lord. 
Have not men preached Christ for contention? 
Have not as large sacrifices been offered at the 
shrine of party as were ever laid on the altar of 
principle ? Has not vanity often had fully as much 
to do as humanity with raising asylums for the 
orphan, the houseless, and the sick—men in what 
the world regards as monuments of their generosity 
seeking but to gratify their ambition—a monument 
to themselves more enduring and honorable than 
brass or marble? and have not men even burned 
at the stake, and died on the scaffold, and obtained 
a place for their names on the roll of martyrs, 
with no higher aim than that of earthly glory which 


430 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


the soldier seeks in the deadly breach and at the 
cannon’s fiery mouth? I do not say that any man’s 
motives are altogether pure. Such an analysis as 
the Searcher of hearts could make would detect 
what was “of the earth earthy” in our noblest 
sacrifices and most holy services. Our wine is 
never without its water, nor our silver without its 
dross; nor we less entirely and absolutely de- 
pendent on the mercy of God and the merits of his 
Son than he who, when one spoke to him of his 
good works, replied, I take my good works and my 
bad works, and casting them into one heap, fly 
from both to Christ—to fall at his feet, crying, 
Save me, Lord, I perish. 

Still, when zeal for our own ends and interests 
appears so like zeal for God; when the counterfeit 
bears so close a resemblance to good money that 
it needs a close eye to discern the difference and 
detect the cheat; when such as, in their natural 
honesty, would scorn to impose on others, or 
make a stalking-horse of religion, may impose on 
themselves ; it behoves us to see that God, and 
not self, is the centre of our system; and that, in 
the words of the Apostle, whether we eat or drink, 
or whatsoever we do, not seeking our own glory, 
we do all to the glory of God. 

2. There is a zeal without knowledge that is 
not zeal forthe Lord. ‘I bear them witness,” says 
Paul, speaking of his countrymen, ‘‘that they have 
a zeal, but not according to knowledge.” Unless 
directed by that, zeal may be wasted, and worse 
than wasted. Baleful, as when it calls down fire 
from heaven, it may prove positively injurious to 
the cause of truth and righteousness, 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 43 


And who can read the history of the Church, or 
almost of any section of it, without feelings of 
sorrow and regret that so much zeal has been 
expended on the outworks, and less important 
' parts, ofreligion? The water that might have been 
turned with advantage on the green sward and 
grateful soil has been spent on batren and thank- 
less sands; and like the lean kine of Pharaoh’s 
dream which devoured the fat and were themselves 
none the fatter, how has zeal about ceremonies, 
forms of government, and modes of worship, with- 
out any advantage whatever to the interests of piety, 
outraged the gentle spirit of religion, and swallowed 
up the weightier matters of the law? Has the zeal 
been according to knowledge which, as if the out- - 
works were more important than the citadel, gave 
more heed to matters of form than to those of 
faith ?—that expending itself on the ornaments and 
walls of the temple, left the light in the lamp and 
the fire of the altar to expire. I cannot doubt that 
the prince of the powers of the air has had a hand 
in many of those storms about minor matters which 
have so often agitated, and, but for Christ’s interpo- 
sition, would have sunk his Church. Speaking of 
Satan, the Apostle says, We are not ignorant of his 
devices ; and with such device as military com- 
manders employ when they make a feint attack 
on some outwork that, while the defenders of a 
beleagured city fly to its protection, they may 
seize the citadel, Satan has raised many con- 
troversies about secondary matters—his object to 
kindle unholy passions, weaken the Church by 
divisions, and divert men’s attention from Christ 
and him crucified, from souls and them saved, 


432 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


Controversies will arise that are mot to be 
avoided. ‘I came,” says our Lord, ‘‘not to send 
peace on earth, but a sword. I am come to set 
a man at variance against his father, and the 
daughter against her mother, and the daughter- 
in-law against her mother-in-law.” It is also true 
that what the world regards as small matters may 
in the light of their consequences assume a 
character of the highest importance. Crowns have 
been lost and won on a narrow battle-field; a 
small hole in its hedge admitted the serpent into 
Eden; and solid rocks have been rent asunder 
by the tiny seed which wind, or bird of heaven, 
had dropped into their fissure. Yet when all the 
zeal, and money, and time, and prayers we can 
bestow are all too little for saving souls, it must be 
a melancholy spectacle to the angels of heaven, 
still more to Him who gave his blood to save us, 
to see the life-boat’s crew turn away from those 
who with outstretched hands are crying, Save us; 
we perish !—to waste the precious moments in 
angry debates on the mending of a spar, or 
the shape and form of a sail. 

We may well believe that; and without breach 
of charity doubt whether their zeal is not rather 
kindled of hel! than of heaven, who are more 
zealous for the points on which they differ, than for 
the principles on which they agree with other 
Christians. He at least presents a wretched speci- 
men of religion who labors more to convert 
Christian men to his own sectarian views than men 
who are no Christians to Christ and saving faith. 
This is zeal for a sect, certainly not for the Lord. 

Not only so, but the worst passions have 


JEMU THE ZEALOT. 433 


animated, and the most shocking crimes been 
committed by such as have said with Jehu, Come, 
see my zeal for the Lord! Paul persecuted the 
Christians; and exceedingly mad against them, 
haled men and women to prison, compelling them 
to blaspheme; and thought the while that he did 
God service. Many others have done the like. The 
Inquisition, with all its unutterable cruelty and 
bloody horrors, sprung from religious zeal—of a 
kind. If zeal has bravely borne the fires of the 
stake, zeal also has kindled them—all the difference 
in some cases between the martyr whose memory 
we revere and his murderers whose names we load 
with infamy this, in the one case the zeal was, 
and in the other it was not according to knowledge. 
Excellent property as it is, when committed to 
such poor earthen vessels as we are, zeal is apt to 
turn acrid and sour. We have need, therefore, 
when most zealous for the Lord, or fancy our- 
selves to be so, to see what spirit we are of. 
Are the objects we aim at, and the means we use 
to accomplish them, such as God approves? He 
will not be served with “strange fire ;” and 
repudiating all uncharitableness, and bitterness, 
and intolerance, and persecution, Jesus Christ will 
have his followers support his cause and defend his 
crown by no other sword, and in no other spirit, 
than his own. Intolerance, fierce, uncharitable 
passions, the bitter tongue, pens dipped in gall, are 
not zeal for the Lord; but weapons, equally with 
Peter's sword, repudiated and forbidden by Him 
who, turning to that disciple said, Put up again thy 
sword into its place; they that take the sword 
shall perish with the sword. 
28 


434 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


3. Being on their guard against a spurious, let 
men cultivate a true zeal for the Lord. 

Zeal is an essential as well as excellent charac- 
teristic of true religion. Dead bodies acquire the 
temperature of surrounding objects—not so living 
ones. Hence plants are less cold than the snow 
that wraps them, and the polar bear lies in her icy 
cave with blood as warm as our own. Wherever 
there is life, there is heat; nor is it till death 
ensues that the brow has the touch of marble and 
the body becomes as cold as the grave it lies in, 
or the waves that are its floating sepulchre. So 
wherever there is Christian principle, a new and 
spiritual life, there is, and must be, zeal. There 
may be, and are, different degrees of it—just as 
the blood of some animals is warmer, and the 
lustre of some stars is brighter, and the perfume 
of some flowers is sweeter than that of others: 
but zeal for the Lord, more or less developed, 
will be found in all true Christians. Continued 
torpor is as incompatible with spiritual as with 
animal existence: and cold indifference to the cause 
of Christ, the glory of God, the good of souls, the 
honor and interests of the Redeemer’s kingdom 
as great a moral as this is a physical impossi- 
bility—a man who does not breathe, or a sun that 
does not shine, or a fire that does not burn. Piety, 
as has been well remarked, may consist with error 
but cannot with indifference—and if such be our 
state, our usual and permanent condition, in 
imagining ourselves Christians, it is certain that 
‘““we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” 

Nor should we be contented with a zeal that 
smoulders rather than burns; and, giving forth 


JEHU THE ZEALOT. 435 


more smoke than flame, goes off in speeches rather 
than actions, in good wishes rather than in good, 
brave, self-denying works. If I had as many lives 
in my body as I have hairs on my head, said a 
martyr, as he stood on the reeking scaffold, I would 
give them all for Christ. Such is the zeal we 
should aim at, and pray for; and which, if our 
prayers spring from the heart, we do pray for in 
asking that the same mind may be in us that was 
in Jesus Christ. But how is that mind, any 
semblance of that mind, in him who calculates not 
how much but how little he can with some regard 
to decency give to the cause of Christ; for how 
small a composition of the debt he owes to Jesus 
conscience will grant him a discharge ; how he can 
best excuse himself for avoiding sacrifices on 
Christ’s behalf which would no more than a cobweb 
stop a man bent on making money, or winning 
fame, or gratifying his appetites? In such a case 
where is our love, and our likeness to Him who gave 
Himself—his soul to the wrath of God, his brow to 
the tnorns, and his body to the cross—for us, 
saying, as well he might, ‘‘ The zeal of thine house 
hath eaten me up”? There is no soldier whose 
bones lie bleaching on the battle-field, nor pale 
student whose life is wasting with the oil of his 
midnight lamp, nor even squalid wretch who walks 
our streets in poverty and rags, but may put most 
Christians to the blush. To say nothing of the 
world’s, Satan has servants who scruple at no 
sacrifice, the most precious and costly. I could 
produce thousands who have sold all, and parted 
with all—money, health, character, peace of mind, 
wife, children, everything man counts dear, to serve 


436 STUDIES OF CHARACTER. 


their master—but their master is not Christ, nor 
their zeal zeal for the Lord. It is sad to think that 
more is done, is suffered, is sacrificed for drink and 
the devil than for Jesus Christ. The Lord have 
mercy on us! May he pour out on us a larger 
measure of his own Spirit, and of Christ’s !—that 
kindled of heaven, lighted at the altar fire, 
associated with the charity that thinketh no evil, 
beareth all things, believeth all things, and hopeth 
all things, our zeal may be a flame that enlighten- 
ing, warming, and blessing others, consumes none 
but ourselves. 


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Makers 


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f Rev. DAVID GREGG, D.D. 
A series of historical lectures, studies of the 





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‘‘They differ from ordinary sermons in that they 
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F THAT 
ACTS « FAITH 
FOR 
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CONTENTS BY CHAPTERS,—God;—Christ;— 
The Bible;—The Church;—The Lord’s Day;— 
Testimony of Human Experience;—Prayer;— 
Death ;— Regeneration ;— Justification; — Resur= 
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Power;—Conditions of Receiving the Spirit;— 
Thomas the Sceptic;—Christian Character. 


We would go a good way to listen to sucha series of sermons as 
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most lofty motives inspire them all.— The Congregationalist, Boston. 


We give this volume hearty welcome. Dr. Cree a great 
preacher, We have heard him preach many times. is sermons 
are wrought out with critical care; are comprehensive, complete 
and finished. Inspiring and faith building—spiendid models for 
young and, indeed, all ministers.—Zzon's Heradd, Boston. 


12mo, 314 pages, cloth, $1.00. 


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